Transformative changes in our production and consumption habits are needed to
enable the sustainability transition towards carbon neutrality, no net loss of
biodiversity, and planetary well-being. Organizations are the way we humans
have organized our everyday life, and much of our negative environmental
impacts, also called carbon and biodiversity footprints, are caused by
organizations. Here we show how the financial accounts of any organization can
be exploited to develop an integrated carbon and biodiversity footprint
account. As a metric we utilize spatially explicit potential global loss of
species which, we argue, can be understood as the biodiversity equivalent, the
utility of which for biodiversity is similar to what carbon dioxide equivalent
is for climate. We provide a global Biodiversity Footprint Database that
organizations, experts and researchers can use to assess consumption-based
biodiversity footprints. We also argue that the current integration of
financial and environmental accounting is superficial, and provide a framework
for a more robust financial value-transforming accounting model. To test the
methodologies, we utilized a Finnish university as a living lab. Assigning an
offsetting cost to the footprints significantly altered the financial value of
the organization. We believe such value-transforming accounting is needed in
order to draw the attention of senior executives and investors to the negative
environmental impacts of their organizations