Last year was one of the warmest years on record, and the last 11 years have been the warmest 11 consecutive years ever. There was a time, not too long ago, when unusually warm weather was dismissed as “just the weather being the weather,” but we can no longer look away from what climate change is doing to our planet.
Corporations obviously play a massive role in the sustainability picture. Climate Week NYC, which is this week, is as good a moment as any to ask: How can we turn sustainability ambition into something businesses can actually act on? I’ve been at Climate Week to talk about the work Everpure is doing in impact accounting, for which we recently received an award (more on that later).
While the award is great validation, Climate Week is all about sharing ideas on how we can all help move the needle and continue a conversation that has at its center the health of our planet. Sustainability can’t just be something companies measure and report on. The opportunity is to change the way we make decisions and move the market toward impact-informed, integrated decision-making—and a more sustainable future grounded in financial principles.
What is impact accounting?
Simply put, impact accounting is a way to translate a company’s non-financial environmental and social impacts into monetary value. Where traditional financial accounting tracks revenue, expenses, and profits, impact accounting assigns a financial cost (or benefit) to factors like water usage, carbon emissions, and employee well-being, ultimately creating a profit and loss statement that shows, with actual numbers, how a company is helping or harming people and the planet alongside its traditional financial returns.
Why data alone isn’t enough anymore
Most companies have gotten significantly better at tracking their carbon footprints, water consumption, and waste volumes across their value chain. But reporting those numbers at the end of the fiscal year doesn’t automatically mean they get factored into everyday operational decisions.
The core challenge isn’t a lack of data—it’s context.
When a product team evaluates material options or an operations team chooses a new facility, traditional financial metrics offer a clear common currency: dollars and cents. Environmental metrics, by contrast, often sit off to the side in separate spreadsheets, with measurements reported in metric tons or cubic meters. Because these data sets speak completely different languages, evaluating trade-offs across innovation, supply chain resilience, and long-term cost gets tricky.
How impact accounting bridges the gap
At Everpure, we apply established cost accounting principles to environmental impacts. By using standardized valuation factors—developed by the Value Balancing Alliance and the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts—we can actually monetize environmental factors like greenhouse gases, waste, and water consumption.
What this is really about: creating a clearer lens for decision-making. Monetizing impacts helps our teams:
- Compare apples to apples: It translates disparate metrics across energy, waste, water, materials, and land use into a consistent, unified view.
- Add location-specific context: The real-world cost of water usage varies significantly depending on whether a facility operates in a water-scarce region or a water-abundant one. Impact accounting reflects those nuances.
- Inform customer choices: Beyond internal optimizations, translating these impacts into monetary terms helps us equip our customers to make smarter, more impact-informed buying decisions.
What we’ve learned from putting this into practice
Integrating environmental accounting into standard business practice is a journey, and we certainly don’t have every answer. But as our work has expanded across R&D, supply chain management, real estate, and customer-facing teams, a few key insights have emerged:
- Visibility changes the conversation. When environmental impacts are expressed in terms that align naturally with financial analysis, sustainability stops being an outlier and starts functioning as a core business input.
- Silos break down naturally. Sustainability can’t live solely within a dedicated sustainability department. By grounding impact in financial terms, cross-functional teams—from procurement to engineering—begin speaking the same language.
- Progress beats perfection. You don’t need absolute precision before you start acting. Waiting for flawless data delays insights that can happen right now.
Validation on a global stage
While our work is ongoing, having external validation signals that we’re headed in the right direction. Everpure was recently honored with the 2026 Finance for the Future Award for Leadership in Nature and Biodiversity.
What made this recognition particularly meaningful was the judges’ emphasis on our collaborative, system-wide approach. They highlighted how our diverse teams—spanning real estate, supply chain, R&D, and commercial operations—have worked together to operationalize these concepts. It reinforces a simple truth: When sustainability is treated as an integrated business discipline, people take notice.
From New York back to the business
This week at Climate Week NYC, I participated in “Finance for the Future: Innovation Stories and Insights for Systems Change,” hosted alongside the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and Accounting for Sustainability.
We shared what we’ve learned at Everpure, but we were just as eager to learn from others in the room. Moving from lofty commitments to practical, daily execution is a challenge every forward-thinking organization faces. By sharing real-world frameworks, asking hard questions about implementation, and partnering to scale what works, we can move the market together toward a more sustainable future—one grounded in both environmental responsibility and sound financial principles.
Learn more about our impact accounting work by reading our FY26 Impact Report.
