Our mission as an alliance is to jointly create a globally applicable and comprehensive accounting methodology for the public good.
Our approach will allow corporates and investors to translate social and environmental impacts into the language of business. It integrates financial, natural, human, and social capital in a unified understanding of business value. By piloting and implementing the methodology, we aim to measure and report the true value created by companies in a robust, comparable, and auditable way. This will improve the competitive advantage of companies, add resilience to their business models and enable stakeholders to make informed decisions that create long-term value for everyone.
Want to know how?
Today, there is a wide variety of methods to assess companies’ impacts on society, people, and nature. Our goal is to jointly create methodologies that ensure greater sustainability, transparency, and comparability in business.
We are developing these methodologies in iterative steps. In 2020, we have created version 0.1 of our methodology and tested it in the member companies. The feedback of our members was published in our first pilot study in May 2021 and is incorporated in version 0.2 of our impact valuation methodology.
Since December 2022, the methodology is developed in close collaboration with the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts (IFVI).
Our Impact Statement methodology currently comprises five papers: The general paper on methodoogy, the social and economic topics paper, the environmental topics paper, and two papers on assessing the value chain (extended input-output modelling, and industry-agnostic downstream guidance). In addition to the Impact Statement Methodology, we created a thought piece on future disclosure of sustainability information (VBA disclosure concept for material sustainability matters).
All documents can be found on our Publications page.
At the Value Balancing Alliance, we believe that we must comprehensively understand, quantify, and monetary value the impact of our business models to sustainably manage our businesses. We are developing impact accounting methodologies with our member companies and partners with the aim of collecting robust, comparable and auditable data.
We are proud that we were able to successfully pilot the enhanced methodology v0.4. Our members applied impact measurement and valuation to their decision-making such as purchasing and processing raw materials. Interested to read more? Then have a look at our pilot study here.
We are thrilled to announce that the Value Balancing Alliance has been selected as a finalist in the Finance for the Future Award 2023, Category 1: Driving Change in the Finance Community!
The Finance for the Future Award, presented by ICAEW, Accounting for Sustainability (A4S) and Deloitte, acknowledges individuals, organizations, or joint entrants who are making significant strides in integrating sustainability through education, training, and academia.
Out of 40 nominations from 23 countries this year, we are thrilled to be selected as the Honorees of the UNCTAD ISAR Honours 2021 in the international category for the “VBA Impact Statement and Integrated Accounts” initiative.
For us, this is a huge stimulus to further drive our work, enabling decision-makers to be changemakers for a sustainable economy.