Session 6 of Discovery Days 2024 features the following talks:
00:00:55 – 00:14:24 Professor Mick Peter – Pictures of Sculptures, Sculptures of Pictures
00:15:14 – 00:30:54 Dr Gizella Marton – Accountants of the Future
00:31:28 – 00:48:34 Professor Ian Thompson – Net Zero Accounting for a Net Zero World
Discovery Days offer a fascinating exploration of a wide range of important topics, from health and wellbeing, human rights, and our ground-breaking scientific research and arts practice. All our speakers are helping us to transform lives locally and around the world.
https://www.dundee.ac.uk/engage/events/discovery-days
Welcome to our Discovery Days. It’s great to see so many of you here today and I know we’ve got a number of people online as well. So without further ado, I’m going to introduce us to a to this session. We’ve got three really interesting speakers lined up for us today.
We’ve got Mick Peter, Gizella Marton and Ian Thompson. And Mick is first up. And so Mick is talking to us today about pictures of sculptures, sculptures of pictures. And Mick is a professor of Fine Art and Illustration in our Duncan Jordanstone School of Art and Design. Over to you, Mick. Hi. Welcome, everybody.
I’m going to talk to you about, well, what it says in the title of the first slide. But I’m going to kind of raise the tones of very high intellectual level immediately and go to picture by David Sutherland, the illustrator who drew the Bash Street Kids for many decades, and probably
An inspiration for me thinking about being an artist to begin with. So I’m somebody who teaches illustration in Duncan and Jordanstone. And in my research, I’m interested in the history of illustration and editorial illustration and cartoons in particular, but especially
Where they connect with the idea of what sculptures do and what artists do. So the kind of things that you might feel anxious about if you go into a gallery, so you go into a gallery and you think, What does it mean? And editorial illustrators
Can make pictures about those things and have fun with it. And I tend to follow them in doing a similar thing when I make sculptures of pictures. So here we’ve got a teacher. And I guess because I’m a teacher, I’m kind of aspiring to the sartorial look of this guy. Eventually, hopefully.
And he’s coming in with the raw materials for making a sculpture in solid marble in a wheelbarrow. It’s probably pretty heavy. He’s sweating heavily and he’s bringing into his kind of errant pupils. And the strip does have lots and lots happens in it and lots of disastrous things.
But they’re supposed to be making the sculpture of their headmaster – which goes horribly wrong. But eventually they go to Stonehenge or Stonehinge as it’s been renamed by David Sutherland, and they’re sort of unleashed with their newfound artistic abilities and they start chipping away. And the end result is
They kind of made their own likenesses in the stone. So it’s this idea of “What’s Stonehenge for? What’s it mean?” They kind of interpret it and make it their own thing. They’re trying to make the headmaster say, Why don’t they just make portraits of themselves?
So the Bash Street Kids in these great big stones. And in terms of editorial illustration, I’m always thinking about people like Peter Arno and things where editorial illustration does a job that I find very interesting in the sense that illustration, generally speaking, has to communicate
Fairly complex stuff, even if it’s a gag and it has to be quite legible and quite understandable. So you can see lots of things are happening in Peter Arno’s picture and personally I find fascinating and it talks very directly about the idea of not understanding sculpture.
So you’ve got somebody who’s turning up to the kind of stereotypical, sort of atelier of the artist and he is wearing all the signifiers of an artist, he’s got a beret and he’s got a kind of work like costume, and this person is immediately committed a faux pas before
He’s even entered the atelier because he’s hanging his hat on a sculpture. So this the picture’s telling us that immediately he doesn’t understand what’s thing in the room is a sculpture. So again, it kind of talks that thing of naming objects as artworks. And that’s a long running gag.
So he’s hanging his hat on there. And the sculpture is doing another thing that I found very interesting and I could do a whole other talk would be much, much longer about things with holes in. Very interesting. If you think about modernist sculpture, I tend to think about things that Hepworth
Or Henry Moore who make things with holes in, and that becomes a cipher for a modernist sculpture. So again, illustrators can use those things. So you know where you’re located in art history, which is extremely handy. And so there’s another hole and this is Fougasse is the person that’s famous for “careless
Talk costs lives”- if you know those underground posters in London – and they’re passing something that looks like it’s on the Southbank, kind of looks like a Henry Moore. So the hole has been sort of exaggerated and enlarged. And the person’s saying : “That reminds me, dear – did you remember the sandwiches?”.
So it’s this idea of making a gag about what you’re supposed to feel when you look at a sculpture. So you’re supposed to feel something quite sort of noble. When you look at Henry Moore, you’re not supposed to be thinking about sandwiches.
So I think those are the kind of games that are extremely fascinating. It’s almost like the things you’re not allowed to do, illustrators can do. And here’s another folk hero of mine, Nick Flynn, and another thing about navigating galleries is really fascinating. So I make exhibitions and the problem with exhibitions is people
Have quite set behaviours in exhibitions, so come in and be very quiet and reverential and you don’t want anything to go wrong. So stepping back into things is a big issue and Nick Flynn is the person who fell over in the Fitzwilliam Museum and knocked over some Qing Dynasty vases and here
It says as he claimed he tripped over a shoelace. I guess that’s kind of legal ease, isn’t it, for whether or not he intended to do it. So this is my work here. So I tend to make things that look a bit like editorial cartoons and can kind of read sequentially.
So here’s a person with an enormous camera trying to photograph a mug. He’s bumping into a vase. So you can see in an environment, you can kind of see what’s unfolding. It’s quite legible. The storytelling is in there. And then what happens is they’re trying to repair everything in the second scene.
So in effect, I’m trying to synthesise those sort of experiences of when you talk about what sculpture does and make it into sculpture from those kind of source materials. And here’s some other works. Is his a vitrine that I was invited to make in Nottingham.
And I thought, what will I put in the vitrine ? I thought, what would you do if it were a drawing? Often I start with drawing instead of making. So the idea of somebody taking a bath in it sprung to mind. So something that’s quite easy to do in drawing.
I quite like the difficulty of then having to go and do it and make it so these often they’re life size, so this person’s in the vitrine appears to be filled with water and a bar of soap. And this is it in the situation of an opening, which I think
Despite being a bit blurry, is quite amusing when you see people going about the business of being serious, about thinking about art and being in galleries and kind of ignoring it, which is sort of interesting sort of ludicrously… And here’s something at the Hospitalfield in Arbroath, this sculpture
Commissioned from a few years back, a great place to visit if you haven’t been there. And I made a sequence of outdoor sculptures about my anxiety of making outdoor sculptures, what’s going to happen to them? So I made scenes in which people are interacting with them, but it’s not going quite right.
So somebody is dutifully explaining the sculpture and the first mistake is trying to poke and prod it. I’m going to show you two groupings now of slightly longer sequences of work. And again, I’m conscious of the time, I’ve got quite a good thing here that
Counts down on green and starts to go red, and then I start to sweat. And this is in Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. And I thought again, I tend to approach opportunities to make exhibitions by saying: “what do I feel about the opportunity?”
And this one I felt kind of raw terror and also the idea of, you know, you’ve got a responsibility to talk to people that come into a gallery that’s incredibly popular and incredibly well attended. And wouldn’t it be nice if they could understand what I was on about?
So in this sequence, it starts with an arts administrator talking to an artist in an office and begins to unfold from there. And I thought would be quite interesting to think about the journey of a sculpture. This idea of the all important kind of object and how we have to treat it
Carefully and carry things with like gloves and ask people to sort of unpack it and install it. But to go behind the scenes and make a extended gag about what happens with that. So the arts administrator is going wandering off with a clipboard and then you see in the main space
A sequence of rooms which are the same room repetitively, which show this artist in his studio again trying to play with those tropes of what a studio looks like and trying to make when those Henry Moore type objects. So in the first sequence you see the people have come to collect
His marvellous new sculpture and they’ve got the clipboard to prove it. They begin to encounter problems with moving it because it’s extremely heavy and it’s unwieldy because it’s kind of bulbous. And then the art movers suggest that he might want to introduce
A sort of modification to the sculpture to make it a bit easier to move. So he begins, sets to work, and then in the last one is introduced an extra hole. So it was that kind of guy from those kinds of cartoons that deal
With those Henry Moore type things, which have so many of them. They’re so funny and so fascinating, so many different takes on it. But in this one, it’s that idea that the sort of the kind of intention of the sculpture is binned for its kind of
Practicalities, but on showing it, you no longer see that. So things have happened in the studio that you’re not party to and you take all the intentions to be good intentions. And eventually you arrive in this kind of semi derelict street scene, a gallery that’s closed for installation.
And then because I quite like – but going back to my Nick Flynn slide sort of -disastrous endings or things that we can connect with as sort of fallible people where things go wrong or not quite as we anticipated. So the gallery’s closed, but you can kind of peep through the wall
– they haven’t quite finished making the exhibition. So they’re painting the walls but the two-holed sculpture is in evidence and that’s it from above. So again, you can see that thing about how cartoons work and things live in boxes. I quite like to put things in boxes and there are many boxes
And, and my last few slides are from a project that I completed at the end of last year in Alençon in Normandy, which was really interesting, which is an a drum shaped building. It’s a former – it’s a Halle au Blé, which is a kind of corn exchange. And I talked to the
Curator there about can I make a sequence of sort of scenes about this kind of local collector, almost like what’s the problem of collecting and owning artwork and the people who sell art work? I always find these things sort of fascinating because often a lot of
These interactions and the price of things is whatever you say it is. So in this scene, you can see this in effect roughly six scenes. You can see the collector is there and he’s got a price list. And the price list is my work.
And he looks very unhappy about the cost of the stuff. And the gallerist is on her phone and not paying him great attention. But I wanted to make sculptures that look a bit like if you were doing an editorial about sculptures, they’re sort of ridiculous. They’re like almost “kebab-ed” objects
And in a way trying to sort of make them seem as silly as possible. But again, having to actually make them is quite an interesting process. And here’s the gallerist in her kind of small Parisian probably gallery, in somewhere quite where the rent is low in Paris, slightly graffitied,
Unpacking the work and looking bemused. So I think that state of amusement is what I want to inject into what I do quite often. So how do you feel initially? I feel confused. How do we unpack that? Let’s make some work about it. And here he is again.
You can see with this he’s got his art fair bag. He’s got a rather fetching scarf. He’s wearing the costume of a person that buys art. And this is also him. He’s shutting up shop in a jewellery shop that seems to run out of money is up for sale.
So you can see the problem of the cost of things, which I think is interesting to comment on in the art world happens to be next to these dogs hanging outside a butcher shop and here’s the collector in his apartment -he’s kind of looking out of the window and wondering
What’s been happening, what he’s just bought. He’s got his collection of things that will happen to be the same colour. And so I think ultimately in those sorts of situations with the collector and so on, what I’m doing in the work is trying to synthesise those things that I mentioned the beginning,
Those people like Fougasse, even the Bash Street Kids, that idea of what happens when you cross the threshold of a gallery space and you walk in, you think, okay, how do I unpack this, this codified experience? So in these works and you probably say they’re all are in gallery spaces,
I’m trying to find a kind of way that allows people to sort of feel differently about work. And it’s very interesting to watch people interact with that work because it uses a language of cartoons. You can see that they automatically feel more relaxed,
They feel more that they feel some sort of sense of recognition. It’s recognisable stuff and in a recognisable idiom. And then you can kind of introduce quite complex ideas. And so thanks very much, that’s me. Thank you, Mick. That was really interesting. So we’re going to go through each of the three speakers
And then take questions together at the end. So store your questions for Mick and we will come to them. I’m delighted to introduce next Gizella Marton who’s going to talk to us about accountants of the future. Gizella works in our Master’s in Professional Accountancy program in the School of Business and Economics.
So over to you. So thanks again. And welcome again. So I would like to use the next 10-15 minutes to say thank you to everyone who is involved with this master’s in professional accountancy program and thank them for all their efforts they actually put into this program over the years.
The team – I think we start with the most important one. We start with the students and they are the ones who nominated this program and they are ones who said that this program actually needs appreciation from the student body as well. And we are involved with the students, the teaching team
Within the accounting and finance discipline. We have a few of those colleagues around and we have Justin Hof and Lee Roberts teaching tax and financial management. We have Dooruj and Thando Loliwe teaching auditing and assurance. We have Alison Fordyce teaching financial reporting, Renzo Cordina teaching management accounting, and Ian
Is going to join the team from this semester. We have Igor Kiselev doing financial management with these students and we have the supervisors for the summer project. Paul is in the room who also supervises the students. So we had the teaching team, but we also have class
Representatives, both for the January and September intake. These course representatives support the students on the program, but they not only support the students, but they support the teaching team as well. And they are involved, very involved with the success of the program. We have Careers Services again,
They have dedicated colleagues for the business school. We have Jill Moor, who supports the success of this program. She is the deputy career advisor and involved with the students. I would like to say thank you to the professional services all around the University, especially the administrative support
From the business school for TPG students, the English support. We had Deborah Hardin here, thank you for the support that you provided over the years to the students and thank you for all of the professional bodies and the community, local and wider community to get engaged with the students and with the program.
So what is what we do with these students and how do we achieve this appreciation from the students? You can see the Business School’s vision, which aims to develop innovative and responsible leaders for sustainable future in line with the Business School’s vision and mission statement.
We have three competency goals for this particular program. We do developing knowledge and understanding of these students on particular areas directly related to professional accountancy. You can see financial reporting, performance management, audit assurance, ethics, financial management and tax compliance and fiscal studies. We make sure that these students have a good ethical understanding
And social responsibility, awareness of environmental and social issues. And we try to develop their professional ethics as well and obviously critical thinking and other intellectual skills are also important for these graduates students, professional judgement and decision making and communication are included. So we do try to improve these employability skills
And the employability prospects of the students, and we try to prepare these students for the ever changing business environment. And we try to equip the students with the different functional business and professional competencies that is needed when they actually start to work or they go forward with their professional studies. What we do
Is innovative teaching. COVID-19 obviously pushed us all to try to find new ways of teaching, new ways of assessment, and that’s what we did. And even after COVID, we did try to keep most of those innovative elements. We use blended learning, we use – although this programme
Is fully on campus, we still use – pre-recorded videos or lecture videos, we use pre-recorded solutions to complex questions and exam type questions. We use theory progress tests, which are supported by the University’s virtual learning environment. And it’s not just the teaching which is innovative. We try to give the students an opportunity
To be assessed in different ways, although this program is accredited by the different professional bodies and that means 50% of the assessment has to be exam and it has to be campus-based, envigilated, timed closed book examination, the remaining 50% is up to us, so we give the students an opportunity to challenge themselves
They have individual essays, they have group projects with presentation, they have multiple choice cross tests and currently they are developing a new role-based assessment for taxation and fiscal studies, which will be based on a case, a particular case based on tax evasion and avoidance.
And we try to further develop the students’ ethical standards and moral standards by these role-based new assignments. So we have this variety of assignments. I already mentioned, that all of the class representatives, we have direct contact with these class representatives, not just through that student and staff committee meetings,
Which we had once or twice during a semester. But also we have regular meetings, two-weekly meetings with the class representatives where we can actually exchange ideas and I can report back what is going on and how we can actually develop the teaching, the learning materials.
Student feedback is very important and we do act on the student feedback. For the example, from this year, we freed up a week, week six for the students. So they will not have lectures and tutorials. There they’ll have some time to catch up with the material during that particular week.
That was one of their feedback that they need some time to brief. English support, I already mentioned there, but we have the general business English support, so the students have that opportunity to sign up for Business English during the first and second semester. But they also have individual support, English support,
Especially relating to individual essays and the summer project. This individual support helps them to improve their academic writing, references, and everything that is needed to polish – that individual essay that they will eventually submit. Like I mentioned earlier, this program is an accredited program. It’s accredited by five of the professional bodies.
Originally it was only accredited by ACCA, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, but over the years the program gained recognition from Association of International Accountants, Certified Management Accountants, ICAEW, which is the English and Wales body and through ICAS, which is the Scottish body, that’s the latest one. So this kind of recognition
Of the program signals both to the applicants and the students and for the employers the high quality of the program. These are internationally recognised professional bodies and those who will try to hire accountants will know these professional bodies quite well. Because the program is accredited by ACCA,
We have a chance to provide this so-called ACCA advantage to the students, so the students will have an opportunity to sign up with ACCA and under this Advantage program they have access to Career Fairs. , internship opportunities, work opportunities. They will have individual support for CV writing
So it’s a wide range of sources that the ACCA makes available to the students. We do have agreements with these professional bodies and they do provide certificates, different certificates to these students for different achievements. For example, the students, the best performing students on the summer project will have an ACCA certificate for that
Best written individual project, and those certificates are given out during the prize giving ceremony. So all family members and friends could see their achievement during the Prizegiving ceremony. We have very strong link to professional bodies and that local business community and that means we have guest lectures, we have workshops,
We have drop-in sessions, we have all sorts of involvement from these professional bodies and local communities. These guest lectures, especially the ones given by the different local companies. For example Henderson Loggie, EQ Accountants, NCR, Johnston and Carmichael, give the students an opportunity to get a better understanding on recent or relevant topics.
It gives the students an opportunity to get a firsthand insight into the practical application of the theories that we actually look into during the classes. The sessions with the professional bodies give the students an opportunity to ask questions from professionals who’s in many cases
That, for example, they’re council members within this professional bodies so they can ask direct questions from these professionals who visit the University. The guest lectures are always related to the syllabus. So for example, recently we had classes on big data, data analytics, then financial dashboards. We had the classes on cloud accounting,
Classes on charity accounting and how that’s going to change, what possibly changes, we had guest lectures on ethics. So all those topics are directly related to that syllabus of this particular student’s. There is a built in business game into the syllabus. It’s built into the professional management accounting syllabus, chartered management accountants
Come to the campus and offer a business camp to the students. It’s a group business game – students are presented a case and they need to solve that case. Come up with suggestions and solutions. They have to present those suggestions and solutions and at the end,
They can get the certificates from SIMA for their achievements. We do have tailored career sessions. I mentioned at the beginning that we have Jill Moore, who works with the postgraduate students. These tailored career sessions are built into the programme. These are scheduled for the students, compulsory for the students.
The students have sessions on CV writing, interview techniques, networking, and they do have two specific sessions directly related to graded assignments. They have a session on presentation techniques and they had another session on communication and professional techniques, professional context. And these photos were actually taken during that last session
And you can see Sam, who’s one of our undergraduate from the Bachelor of Accountancy doing the workshop with Jill. And that means, again, we have one of the local businesses involved with this programme. Sam currently works for EQ Accountants. Sage Certificate – I’m
Conscious of the time, the students again as the sort of graded assignment, have a chance to work through an online course. And once they work through the online course, they could take a test and they could get an official Sage certificate
And they can see how transactions and events are actually treated in accounting information systems and reported in accounting information systems. And you can see, obviously it goes up to LinkedIn and all sorts of social media because they have a digital badge as well. We also provide the students a chance to be
Always updated and the alway informed about all sorts of events and webinars they can attend, magazines published by the different professional bodies, opportunities on jobs and internships and it is highly appreciated by the students. So I think that’s me. And then I’m in the red. So thank you! Thank you, Gizella.
And again, audience – just keep your questions and we will come to them after the next speaker. So I’d like to introduce now Professor Ian Thompson, who is Chair of Accounting and Sustainability in the School of Business, and he’s going to talk to us about net zero accounting for net zero world.
Over to you. Imagine for a moment the football game is decided on the number of passes that a team makes or how loud the crowd shouts. Imagine the Nobel Prize for science is decided by TikTok likes or the winner of Bake Off is based on the amount of sugar that’s in a recipe.
But that seems like madness, doesn’t it? Or at the very least, It’s going to be. Those types of ways of measuring things, distort the practices, distort what’s actually going on, at least in kind of like deviate things away from the original purpose
Of a game of football, of a Nobel Prize for science or a nice cake. But how we measure things really matters. How do we decide winners from losers? How we decide good from bad, very good from kind of like excellent. And we make these discriminations and underpinning
This is how we measure things, which is often overlooked. We often don’t actually kind of like scratch the surface of some of the data that’s actually used to actually do things. And when we’re trying to measure things that matter the most, measurement matters more. We need to get that measurement right.
But surely, surely something as important as climate change, we don’t have an issue there. We don’t have you know how like, by the way, it’s crucial: Dortmund is the loudest team, everyone thinks Galatasaray, but there we go – some interesting research. When it comes to something like climate change, which is arguably difficult
To think of something which matters more to people on this world. It’s kind of like it’s an existential threat to what’s actually going on. It matters more to more people, to more different and more different kind of like aspects of what’s actually going on. And climate
Change is something that we actually know what causes. It’s green – increasing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the atmospheric kind of concentration of different gases in the atmosphere with beyond reasonable doubt that we know these different things. And climate change is causing many, many different things unliveable cities, starvation, species extinction,
Water insecurity, water stress. Whole industries are actually kind of like being wiped out. Communities are being sort of like dislocated from there. We have the bizarre paradox in places like Australia where we have flooding and fires happening at the same time, right? It’s one of the biggest threats that we’ve actually got.
It’s also one of the things that we also have some of the most reliable and consensus amount of scientific evidence on what’s actually causing it. We know what’s causing it. We know how to solve it. We know how to measure greenhouse gas emissions, and yet we’re not actually doing enough about it.
And actually, when we come to look at the evidence base and this is one of the big things that’s coming from this kind of research over this this time is that what we have is underpinning this is forms of accounting that actually don’t reflect the reality of what’s actually going on.
It doesn’t provide the information and the evidence that decision makers – and that can be business leaders, that can be politicians, can be individual consumers that actually provide the evidence that they- can look at and choose the right option.
In fact, I would argue that what we have – and hopefully I will demonstrate some of the reasons behind that is what we actually have – is forms of carbon accounting that actually tell lies, that actually distort decision making. And then when people look at it, even well-intentioned individuals and well-intentioned organisations
Trying to do the right thing based on the evidence in front of them, pick the wrong things and make things worse. Let’s imagine, let’s imagine we’re a government in the United Kingdom. Let’s imagine we are. Isn’t it about time that we had opened another deep coal mine?
All right, could we imagine we’re kind of considering that sort of thing, even though we know our facts are facts and the social scientists and here and stuff like that. But we pretty much know that if we burn all of the known fossil fuel reserves, we will exceed the global carbon budget
To keep to one and a half degree warming, not by 10%, 20%, but a factor of seven. Now, that’s a good margin forever. We actually saw a cycle. We also know that the only real way to actually to achieve the 1.5 is to move to net zero as quick as possible. Okay.
Oh,and by the way, there is no shortage of fossil fuels anyway. There’s plenty there that we actually have. Maybe it’s not in the right place first. Okay. So we have this thing that we’re actually going to move in on. We need to move to net zero, remembering that last year,
As the results have just come out, it was the hottest year ever on record and the last in a worrying trend. So we really do have a kind of a problem that’s actually there. Net zero quite simply means no more -and kind of carbon dioxide are the – greenhouse gases
Going into the atmosphere without taking out. We have a flux where we can absorb carbon through nature based systems and different things like that. So if we’re going to kind of like to look at this, how can we take this net zero claim?
So this is a big thing that’s actually happening in businesses and we’re all aware I’m an accountant so we know the magic that financial accountants can do an asset into a liability, a loss into a profit, a profit into a loss, a liability into income. Is it possible that carbon accounting
Can do the same magic and make emissions disappear and make it seem like what we’ve got is we’re reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time that we’re actually making things worse? I mean, did you know that every company in the UK, every large business has to produce its annual greenhouse gas emissions?
As far as annual reports, yes. Good. Do you think that this information is any use for decision makers? Let’s explore this a little bit. Let’s take this and this example is coal mining. And here we have a kind of a graphic that kind of represents
Most of the greenhouse gas emissions from the inputs that come into the air, things that they buy, things that they use and what we call embedded emissions. We have the energy that they use, we have the activities, and then we have the future carbon as a consequence
Of that kind of like the product. So you make something, you sell it, other people use it. So based on this and the UK government’s current way of properly accounting for greenhouse gases, properly accounting for greenhouse gas emissions and it’s same as virtually every other
And national report and most sort of like stock exchanges listing other than the EU who like forget all this, they include all these emissions, another wonderful Brexit, Brexit kind of dividend. Let’s see right what are included to net off to zero. Well we’ll get rid of all the products
Because obviously that’s got nothing to do with the company. So when we’re looking at the net zero to net off emissions but to balance time, well get rid of all of our products and we might as well get rid of all the inputs as well. And while we’re at it, well,
Let’s get rid of waste, employee commuting and business travel. And this is what we now call is the annual emissions of a company that we have to net off to zero. If we put this in some form of context in the coal mining sector that equates to a third of the emissions.
So by magic, truly complying with kind of government regulations and list requirements, we can actually get rid of two thirds of the emission and then we can then often plant a few trees or pretend to do some other kind of things that actually go on
And claim that this coal mine is net zero. Net zero, while still putting double the amount of carbon into the atmosphere, which isn’t net zero. Yet, anybody looking at the accounts of this could believe that it’s actually there. And if we just maybe look at some of – let’s
Put some kind of numbers on this, let’s just look at the coal for one year off this one mine just the use of it planned out. It’s about 2.8 million tonnes. That produces 8.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. That always screws my head, actually.
So, you know, kind of like when you burn stuff, you think it gets less and gets warmer. This coal is virtually pure carbon. So you multiply it by about three – sorry, apologies to chemists and physicists there, but I’m an accountant.
How many if we take the emissions, how many times during the world would you think you would be driving to kind of convincing us? We didn’t surprise you to think it’s 1.3 million times from the equator, right? From one year out, from this, this net zero.
This is stuff which is not included in the net zero calculation. And if we want, it’s actually 540 million commuter journeys between Edinburgh and Dundee or over a billion train journeys a year between flying, they’re all, all sectors not alone. There we go. Other sectors are in fact coal sectors- not too bad
Because they actually dig stuff and do things. Things like financial sector 98% of their emissions are not included. IT is a similar percentage. So we’ve got a massive problem of non-accounting for emissions that actually kind of like go in there. So there’s a real need to develop proper carbon accounting
That tells a consequential climate truth of what’s actually going on. So when we look at a number, that’s what we should judge against and that’s very much the work that we are actually kind of like trying to do in this field and this net zero accounting.
And we want to move towards what kind of Mark Carney, the ex-governor of Bank England in Canada says: every time we produce a financial number, we should have a carbon number alongside it and then maybe we can start making better decisions on what’s actually going on. One of the problems we have
Is that greenhouse gas emissions are invisible as one of the problems. They are invisible. It’s really difficult. We can’t see them, we can’t see. We can’t smell it I’m emitting – we’re all emitting carbon. You’re all emitting carbon, right? We can’t see it.
So therefore we need technique, we need technologies, we need accounts to make it make the invisible visible, to make it measurable, to make it then manageable so we can then put it into decisions. Now, we do have take, take technologies that actually allow it.
A little picture there is that we have cameras that can actually see greenhouse gas emissions, can see carbon dioxide can see it. We’ve got space satellites. They can identify methane emissions and stuff like that. But what we need to do is we need to try and find ways in which
We can actually make this accessible. Imagine a superpower that we could look at something and we could see the past emissions, that current emissions and the future emissions of different use cases and different scenarios because that’s what we really need to start to make the kind of decisions
If we’re actually going to go and actually do that, we need to find ways that we can do this simply and also in a way that can be assimilated into decision making process. Using ideas from Choice Architecture, the latest developments in digital science,
The different ways in behavioural science, and how we can actually turn this into this and this new visibility into something that’s actually going to be meaningful. So when we look at something like a car, when we’re looking at something like a car
Going to look at it, we want to be able to see, imagine the kind of the whole life cycle carbon consequences of this, the inputs, the operations, and then the kind of activities and the purpose so that this picture provides us a baseline. Creating accounts doesn’t actually solve anything.
It’s the decisions that come as a consequence of this. So we can actually look at this as a kind of a baseline and start to see where the opportunities are for us to actually to intervene by providing this kind of this life cycle.
And so if like greenhouse gas emissions, we can then start to look at things and then we can look at ways in which we can actually intervene. So if we use waste activities rather than virgin kind of activities, we can then reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the life cycle of this person
Of course, circular economy dividend. We’ll look at fuel efficiency, we can look at smarter energy technology. We can look at the purpose of the journeys. Why are we adjourning when the easiest ways to minimise kind of like unnecessary journeys and maybe it’s about rethinking the idea of car ownership to low carbon
Social mobility, which is again a very different kind of concept. But we also need to build up carbon literacy because there’s no point providing evidence to people who don’t know how to use it. So what we need to do is we need to prevent
Also create this kind of carbon literacy within decision makers who can ask the right question, who can challenge some of these assumptions and make sure that at every point on this, we can systematically identify the lowest carbon kind of like emissions that are actually there.
And that’s really what we mean when we’re trying to look at stuff like net zero accounting for a net zero world. And that’s why, if you like, in terms of the work that we’re doing within the department of Accounting, within other kind of like things, is actually
To develop, use the best practice from accounting and apply this to the kind of the problem of climate change so we can create accounts that actually prepare us. And in a more specific level, there’s three strands, I think, to the work that’s actually going on.
Strand one is making sure that everybody knows that the way we currently do it is our crock is not appropriate or fit for purpose, right? We need people to do that because most people do not know that. And why would they?
They’re not experts, are not geeks, have not studied this for 30 years. The other thing is to develop new greenhouse gas accounting techniques that measures what we treasure and for me, which are the treasures of the earth and life, all the life that’s on it. And we need to innovate and develop
New techniques, new methods, new protocols and new things here. And then we also need to kind of like greatly enhance climate literacy and disseminate best practice carbon accounting throughout the world. Personally, I gave myself a goal about five years ago after being afraid for the future mark
And that is, as an accounting academic, I want to ensure that every single undergraduate doing accounting and finance is exposed to climate, and climate finance and climate accounting in there so that we can actually start to kind of do that. And there’s more to it in there.
But what we kind of find is that if we don’t have this evidence, we can’t make the right decisions, we can’t make the policies, Individuals will actually make mistakes. That’s why I would argue that accounting can help save the world. Thank you. Thank you, Ian. That was fascinating.
Okay, so we’ve got some time for the questions. I’ve asked the three speakers to come to the front of the stage, Jon is going to capture any questions from online, but I’m going to turn to questions from in the room first. So do we have any questions for any of our speakers? Yep.
I was fascinated by what you were saying there about net zero accounting, Ian, and I was going to ask, I absolutely agree that accountants-to-be, the students in training should certainly be exposed to the net zero world. Let us say. How many other universities are doing this? Do you know?
We took us- we did a survey years ago just before Glasgow COP20 – three years ago, my goodness – and we identified that over 150 universities around the world are doing some climate change and may not obvious but my previous job I just joined from Birmingham. From Birmingham University
Where we were the first university to mainstream climate accounting in all of our courses in accounting and finance. We’ve been working with – there’s a research network, Centre for Social Environmental Accounting that’s about 900 active environmental accounting researchers. And again, we’re working with that kind of organisation to move things through.
It’s happening, it’s often secret – smuggle it in here and there, but there is in Britain that’s I mean I think I’m looking to a colleague here, I’d say maybe about 25%. There are some really good examples. You know, So for example, there’s the Imperial College
And Edinburgh University have dedicated master’s programs on it, and we’re kind of like working with University of Tasmania if they wanted to include different things in the program. So professional accountancy bodies are looking intently at this as well. So I’m working with them to include it. It’s not enough.
It’s starting decades too late. But there does seem to be an interest and momentum in developing around it. Thank you and down front here. Thanks again to Ian and Gizella. It’s really the role of the professional bodies and to what extent there’s momentum building behind
Accounting for net zero now both professional bodies in terms of the research you’re doing with them, Ian and also Gizella, in terms of the students you’re Helping to graduate. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think all of the professional accounting bodies that Gizella put up are actually have initiatives underway
Working with also with the Financial Reporting Council – sorry if this is going a bit nerdy to nt-accountants- but Financial Reporting Council are the regulatory bodies of accountancy so they tell them what they have to do. So we’re also working with the Financial Reporting Council
To actually just so to eminate them all the way through and is already included in some of the syllabus and I know Gizella can mention that there’s quite a lot of change going on in this space as well. Yeah. All of the professional bodies, as you mentioned, started to introduce
Environmental and social awareness related topics and reporting that we also need to include in the syllabus. So for example, the programme I was talking about, professional accountancy. In every single taught module we actually have some elements of environmental and social accounting. For example, in financial reporting we talk about the reporting part.
Ian has the management accounting and that will involve some environmental accounting and non-financial performance measures as well. In financial management we have green finance included in the syllabus or in auditing, we have corporate governance and we also have assurance of environmental and social reporting. So we do try to include elements
Into the syllabus, but it takes some time. And unfortunately, these professional bodies do not cut other areas from the syllabus. So we will need to cover what we have today and the additional elements to that. So it’s a sort of balancing of this. I will say one thing, the
University of Dundee plays a critical part in the development of social environmental accounting. Professor Rob Grey, I think in 1990 formed the Centre for Social Environmental Accounting and this, at Dundee ,was the first university, I think almost in the world to introduce this as a topic at a time when everyone thought
Rob and myself were mad and now it’s actually sort of coming through. So there’s a long tradition, if you like, the origins of this. All of this lie in this very institution. Question down here. That’s a question for Mick. Hi Mick! You make your work across illustration, sculpture and narrative.
And I just wonder if you could unpack the process of your process. Like where the ideas come from, how they come and how you develop them. Sure. And I think for me, I tend to approach all or any situation sort of in terms of how I might feel about as a practitioner,
But also how you might feel as somebody who’s going to see it. And kind of, you know, those feelings aren’t necessarily to do with, you know, the sort of more kind of headlines, generic things about a space or an exhibition space.
So, you know, how do you feel about this kind of scenario that you’re in? How do you feel about the room or the size of the room? How do you feel that people might encounter work in that space? Because you’re not the only person to do something in these situations quite often.
So how’s that encounter going to feel for people coming to a space? So I tend to try and unpack that first. I’ll also do quite a lot of observational drawing and kind of sounding out. So I guess that’s really illustrators’ practice that you always
Kind of keep your hand in by looking and recording and often it’s a bit of a portmanteau thing. It’s kind of assembling visual gags from different sources and making sense of them in a narrative as you describe. So I think that’s probably my responsibility.
I’ve got one eye on the audience, one eye on kind of legibility, which again, I suppose is something comes from an illustration or a design scenario that you kind of you’re wanting it to be understood, at least on some levels. And it might be sort of unpackable beyond that and
It might have more rhetorical kind of art world gags in it. But the kind of top line stuff should be really clear and kind of engaging. I think that sort of disarming thing is probably what I would want to do first. There’s a few different things that happen.
Probably I’m drawing on something that I’m doing all the time and I’m kind of thinking about my feeling about it and somebody else’s feeling about it and trying to pull that in. And then I’m also trying to have fun or make it feel like it’s fun, I guess. Thank you.
So a number of questions here. I think we’ll go to the lady in the far left first and then coming to you. I have a question for Mick. So I would say that normally a cartoon is very much of an (…) object.
You get through them very quickly and we rarely look after them. A sculpture we see as something that’s just going to be around for a very long time. How do you preserve and do you preserve of the installations or are they something that actually is there for the long term?
And what were your intentions for it? Or do you just preserve the installation as it happens and record that information? I think I tend to make the so particular to where it is that its component parts might live on. But a lot of it’s like kind of scene
Making in the sense that it’s almost like a set building. So the scenario is like how you kind of control the environment and the framing of it. It’s a bit like the boxes described in Baltic. It’s a way of some of the temporary components are very much like a visual framing of it,
But it’s kind of made in a temporary way and quite, you know, in terms of, you know, if we’re thinking about carbon and things like that. And I’m trying to make things where you’re not storing tons of things and you’re not using processes that are actually…
Because if I’m always got a kind of sense of the irony of the position that you’re in, so it’s on for a certain amount of time, is it really sensible to make it all out of concrete? And, you know, so a lot of the things, quote things from TV production or set
Building that the temporary nature of it is built into it. So a lot of those things are big drawings scaled up and made into kind of things that encapsulate a narrative or experience, but break down into generic stuff. Some can be spirited away or sort of reused.
So bits live on and kind of have made in a slightly more thorough way or have to really purport to be the thing that they look like they are. But a lot of it is taking something that’s 1/10 of the size, puffing it up and sort of designing it like that.
So it does have that kind of a sense of how it falls apart afterwards. So I see a great cartoon in the magazine. You going to recycle the magazine? Probably. It’s that sort of sense is probably in it as well. Thank you. We have questions there. Thank you. Ian, I’m just wondering,
Is there an international agreement how net zero accounting is measured? And I think just very, very quickly, just very simply explain how do you actually measure carbon emissions in monetary terms? I mean, this is I think would have to be believable and accepted as real figures to be you know to be noticed.
So just wondering how this international agreement – how do you actually measure it. Okay. First of all there is no – net zero means nothing, effectively. It’s one of these empty kind of signifiers. And it has no defined meaning. And that’s how oil companies can claim to be net zero
Even though they’re responsible for about a third of all global kind of like emissions, because they don’t have to take it into account. Now, there are different competing voluntary standards on how you calculate it. And what unfortunately, what we have now is we have a series of competing definitions of net zero and
Which are there from – often there’s a UN greenhouse gas protocol which underpins the life cycle. So there is a well-established and kind of like methodology that actually has been around for, I’d say about 30 years and has continued to adapt. The problem is that political opponents
Like to select certain elements from it. So it’s very much a kind of a choice. Which bits do you actually kind of pick? I would say that my approach is not to value financially carbon. I think what you do is you have the financial numbers
And alongside it you then have the carbon consequences. It’s like stating the transaction in a different currency. And typically what you do is there’s massive databases of different components, different products that actually people have actually done the lifecycle assessment versus, you know, environmental scientists as a whole.
There’s huge databases of these different things. So typically what you would do is you would go, right, we’re using concrete, we know that concrete has – would be going to the ‘concrete’ file. It tells us the embedded emissions, energy emissions, high or low integrity to try to translate to.
So it’s very much it’s a very kind of mechanistic type process, all the kind of like the data’s there and it’s just to assemble it together. There is a real I think there’s a real danger in trying to value carbon financially. That’s fraught with difficulty. It’s really fraught with difficulty
Because as soon as you put a price on something, it means as long as you pay more than that, then you can screw things up. It’s like, you know, it’s very difficult to get that kind of financial commensalation, which is kind of problematic. And you can value certain things.
You know, we can value things in a, you know, an electric car versus a diesel car. We can value the – we can including the value of the car and what you would actually want to pay for that in relation to its climate impact. But that’s a slightly different type of process.
Thank you. I’ve got a question from online and it’s for you, Ian. Firstly, the person wants to thank you all for your presentations. And then the question is really how does the UK’s legislation compare to other countries and really what the question is, is are there other countries
That we could learn from and that we might take example from. The European Union, there we go. The European Union has those countries, some we do not want to take after, but I’m not listing that. The EU has some of the most comprehensive and rigorous carbon accounting standards.
So in that diagram that I showed you of all of the different components, if that was European mine, we would have to disclose all of those carbon emissions as part of the things to net off. And if you’re in the UK
And you know, sort of like America and other countries, you’ve only got what was referred to as the direct emissions focus, scope one and two. So the EU is and is there and it’s setting up, they’re setting up to be kind of a fight in carbon accounting between
The comprehensive full lifecycle consequential model that’s actually done by the EU or the partial attributional model which is in the rest of the world. And you’ll not be surprised to know that it’s whilst it’s something there’s massive amounts of vested interest and behind the scene fighting going on to control what’s actually there.
So watch watch this space so. Brilliant thank you. Okay so I’d like to thank all of our presenters for such interesting talks today and all of you for your questions which generated some more really interesting discussion. I’d like to invite you all to stay for a cup of coffee.
We have coffee and refreshments outside and indeed to stay for the next session, which starts at 3:15. And I’m asked to ask you to find the feedback forms on your seats and to complete them and to leave them in situ before you leave and they can be collected.
And it will help us understand how we can make these Discovery sessions even better in years to come. But thank you for your attention.