There’s nothing like a natural disaster to bring to life the business need to anticipate and prepare for the future.

That’s what happened when Kathy Nieland, who leads PwC’s Sustainable Business Solutions practice, lived through the devastating hurricane in New Orleans six years ago.

The disaster happened while PwC was growing its corporate responsibility efforts, recognizing increasingly critical community and environmental issues, along with the business imperatives to help resolve them, both internally and as a client service.

“The hurricane had a profound effect,” says Nieland, also the partner in charge of PwC’s New Orleans’s practice. “There were so many systemic issues for so many cities, individuals and organizations that it became clear that sustainability thinking had to be cultivated as a strategic business issue.”

PwC’s internal efforts have grown significantly since that coincidental ‘aha’ moment -as has its sustainability client practice.

The firm’s services now include helping clients with six capabilities for sustainability metrics and reporting:

1. Researching stakeholder needs and macro trends to devise a strategy

2. Recognizing the need to integrate traditional financial and new sustainability metrics

3. Helping companies speed the sustainability reporting process through automation

4. Helping to integrate sustainability into the business

5. Translating environmental and social impact into financial and tax terms

6. Recognizing key trends for the future, including environmental P&L reporting and industries that may need special help

7. Strategy: Stakeholder Needs, Macro Trends

The stimulus for the firm’s sustainability voyage was its 10-yearscenario planning exercise on macro-trends, including: climate change; demographic population change and growth in places like China and Brazil; increasing resource scarcity and consequent price volatility; and US positioning in the global economy.

“The trends showed that as developing countries grow, US influence would be reduced over time, so PwC as a firm had to be able to respond to help clients in new areas, requiring different skills and background, including science, engineering and general understanding of issues like climate change, resource scarcity and related supply change issues,” Nieland says. These trends were gradually incorporated into PwC’s approach to help businesses devise a strategic approach to sustainability.

1. Integrating Traditional and New Metrics

Among the most significant accomplishments for the client practice has been designing the integration of sustainability metrics and reporting with more traditional financial reporting techniques–along with the integration of sustainability throughout companies’ often discretely functioning units.

The firm, known for its accounting, tax, financial audit and advisory and reporting services, approached the coming changes by extending its more traditional reporting services to the environmental and general sustainability area, eventually becoming a proponent of so-called integrated reporting, which allows stakeholders to evaluate the financial and non-financial aspects of business together. Reporting, of course, can take many forms (digital, print, several, one, and so on). The key is for the company to tell an ‘integrated story.’

Next week: learn how macro trends and the ‘integrated story’ helped take sustainability metrics and reporting to the next level with four more capabilities.