CAT Caterpillar Inc

By Tatyana Shumsky 

Accounting for Sustainability, a nonprofit founded by the Prince of Wales, on Thursday launched the first U.S. chapter of its global Chief Financial Officer Leadership Network in San Francisco.

The networking group is made up of eight founding members, all CFOs of large U.S. companies, including Salesforce.com Inc., Caterpillar Inc. and Levi Strauss & Co. The group aims to help business leaders infuse sustainability and solutions to social and environmental challenges into core strategy and business processes.

"This topic of sustainability is a global issue, with a global need that's rising and the businesses that get in front of this in addressing it proactively will not only do well, but do good," said Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins.

"Now is the time to go beyond conceptual understanding and shift to taking action and specific action, which is what we're doing at Salesforce," Mr. Hawkins said.

The founding members of the U.S. chapter of A4S's CFO Leadership Network signed a charter that includes a commitment to take action and use their collective influence to engage, enable and collaborate with other CFOs and the broader business community on tackling sustainability issues.

"If you take action in the right way, it can reduce your cost, it can definitely future-proof your business in terms of potential risks, which can be costly if you didn't anticipate it correctly," said Jessica Fries, executive chair of Accounting for Sustainability.

The organization targeted its outreach to finance chiefs after research showed that while many sustainability stakeholders viewed CFOs as obstacles, they were often leaders in this area, Ms. Fries said. "CFOs bring a huge amount of credibility," she said.

The network, which functions as a forum for CFOs to share best practices, focuses mainly on embedding sustainability considerations in all the decisions a company makes before reporting its results, Ms. Fries said. These include strategic planning, capital investment and risk management.

The networking group is the latest in a series of efforts by the global business community to tackle concerns about climate change, pollution and other environmental challenges. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board in November launched 77 industry-specific market-based standards for measuring, managing and reporting how corporate actions affect society and the environment.

Prince Charles helped establish Accounting for Sustainability in 2004, and the organization launched its first CFO Leadership Network in Europe in 2013. The British royal family member long has been an advocate of environmental and sustainability causes.

Write to Tatyana Shumsky at tatyana.shumsky@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 18, 2019 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)

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