How environmental awareness is going to make you rich

I would tell you that caring about the environment is your social responsibility and is a way to be patriotic, but let’s be honest if I continue with this line of reasoning you will probably move on to the next article. So let me appeal to your money making sense, being environmentally sensitive would save you huge bucks. Got your attention now?

Now I guess you are wondering “how am I going to benefit from incurring extra costs to clean up the community or how am I benefiting from reduced cutting of trees?” especially if that’s a means of income, so let me break it down for you.

The environment includes resources that are depreciable and first you have to understand how you’re influencing and using these resources, what we accountants call analysis and break down of costs.

Let’s take an example of a company like Coca Cola, some of the costs that will contribute to their cost of production and hence commodity pricing will include the electricity, water bills, production waste to mention but are few. So imagine if this company had a cost accountant who analyzed these costs and calculated the variances between them, identifying causes of increases and coming up with solutions to reduce waste and these bills, this would in the long run save the company lots of money increasing the mark-up and reducing the pressure on the environment. This isn’t just something that big companies would benefit from, imagine! How much you would be saving if you turned off the lights when not necessary and shortened that playlist in the bathroom ---- yeah, I know, a lot.

Now let me turn to my farmer friends, I was recently visiting the village and can I just say that the sun was taking my arrival a bit too personally----anyway jokes aside, this was a place my parents moved because they thought it would be better for their livestock. So what changed? I hope you scream it with me.

But why? You might ask how we can reverse this to get some money from this change. There is too much deforestation taking place and if this doesn’t change farming will be an expensive enterprise for a village farmer, so here I am telling you that planting some trees as you practice deforestation will save you from having to incur irrigation costs which let’s face it are way more expensive.

Our responsibility as Ugandans, let’s prioritise holding ourselves and these investors accountable, let us demand for companies to show us how they are working towards more environmentally sensitive processes and let us support those that are doing this and let us boycott those that are not.

The government, you too can make a buck from this. Yes! I said it, there are more areas to impose taxes, and laws should be passed where unoccupied land owners are charged with fencing their property to take out these stages of “kasasiro” dumping.

Lastly, like all returns everyone will require to put in an initial investment whether that be hiring a qualified accountant who is well rounded, planting some trees, fencing off unoccupied property, doing community awareness, giving tax benefits to companies to encourage this. But like all money invested, the return on investment will be worth it.

Agasha Agatha ACCA        Audit Associate.

Macnitosh Consult &Associate