Yes, I know that sounds weird because buttoned-up money

men aren't usually environmental rainbow warriors.

But that is the road we're travelling on.

That status quo-loving balance sheet fundamentalist

is now on the front line of change and rewriting

the rulebook for ESG.

Why?

It's down to that G of ESG, or governance.

Any company manager or investor needs

to know what a company is worth to do their job.

This used to be done with corporate accounts

and accountants who measured profits and loss and assets.

But that ignored anything external to the money flows,

like the environment or social factors.

At best, these were relegated to half-hidden footnotes.

But today, people want to understand

the personality of the company.

What does it stand for?

How do we measure a company's character?

So auditors are scrambling to put issues like the environment

into the accounts to reveal to investors and managers

the risks around companies.

It's not easy.

Nobody quite agrees how to measure carbon costs let

alone gender ratios.

But the activist accountants have produced

a range of competing systems.

One, the so-called general reporting index,

tracks a company's impact on the world.

Another, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board,

measures how external environmental and social issues

have a material impact on companies.

Some systems track impacts in both directions,

or double materiality to use a buzzword.

Then, there's the task force of climate-related financial

disclosures backed by financiers like Larry Fink, and Mike

Bloomberg, and Mark Carney.

It's a messy alphabet soup.

But messy or not, nobody in business

can ignore this because regulators are saying

they're going to make these systems mandatory

in the next couple of years.

Court is now in session.

So the question now is not how much money do you have,

but who are you?

What are the consequences of what you do?

When a risk jumps from the footnotes of corporate accounts

into the centre of the page, you ignore it at your peril.

So better keep watching those new activists, the accountants.