SIX CAPITALS UPDATED EDITION: CAPITALISM, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE ACCOUNTING REVOLUTION THAT CAN SAVE THE PLANET
Original edition shortlisted 800-CED-READ’s best Finance and Economics Book published in North America 2015
A fascinating read. Gleeson-White artfully captivates the reader as she explores the fast evolving language, metrics, actors and laws that are profoundly reshaping ‘capital’ in the 21st century.
Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics and economist at Oxford University
Six Capitals reveals the critical role of accounting in reimagining the way we do business and make policy in the 21st century. It’s time for everyone to pay attention.
Carl Obst, lead author, United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting
Whereas Double Entry was a wonderful work of accounting history, Jane Gleeson-White’s Six Capitals is an ambitious look at what we will acount for in the future.
Dylan Schleicher, 800-CEO-READ (now Porchlight)
This is a seminal work on sustainability … Double Entry ended with a plea to accountants to become the heroes of sustainability and save the planet because only we can do it. Six Capitals tells us how … the clear message, that we must change our way of thinking, will be heard around the world because of books like this.
Stanley Goldstein, New York Hedge Fund Round Table
So broaden financial reports to include measures of social and environmental issues and just watch how it changes the behaviour of business people. Gleeson-White makes a good case for the success of her unlikely revolutionaries.
Ross Gittins, Economics Editor, Sydney Morning Herald
Climate change is here and capitalism is implicated: it’s programmed to privilege profit and growth over human communities and the living earth. We need to change this system – and we need to do it now. Six Capitals charts the rise of four movements designed to overthrow capitalism as we know it: multi-capital accounting, for society, nature and profit; the push for a new corporation legally bound to benefit nature and society while making a profit; ecosystem accounting for nations; and legal rights for nature, which resonate with indigenous earth-centred laws.
These movements are critical for the future of human life on this planet. Together they override the profit-driven modern corporation, the growth-driven nation state and the legal status of the natural world as lifeless property.
Multi-capital and ecosystem accounting, benefit corporations and the rights of nature movement are here to stay. Six Capitals tells their story, from their first emergence in the postwar era to today. This revised, updated edition is for the new generations of business leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, accountants, economists, scientists, farmers, food growers and distributors, teachers, parents, politicians, bureaucrats and concerned citizens everywhere.
Author’s note from April 2020: As I write we’re getting stark lessons in how important our communities and beautiful green places are. We must start valuing them in our economic, accounting and financial systems. The new edition of Six Capitals updates the story of four movements that are designed to do just that: to value people and the planet.
The new subtitle - Capitalism, climate change and the accounting revolution that can save the planet - highlights the link between capitalism, accounting and climate change: the way accountants value people and the planet shapes decision making at every level, from business to government. Currently, our communities and living nature are given NO VALUE in the global economy, and we live with the consequences: horrendous fires, floods, droughts, species extinctions, ecosystem collapse and now a pandemic that is shutting down the world.
Six Capitals contains urgent messages and new ways of thinking for our times. It’s about capitalism’s self-diagnosis as a chronically sick system that must change. Now we must heed the diagnosis and make the change. The times are screaming out at us to do so.