Auditor assurance doesn’t necessarily fix the climate problem

Here’s this note from Alison Taylor about this article:

The problem with treating climate change as an auditing task is that you end up with a bunch of auditors signing off on destruction, placing mindless faith in certification schemes, and not knowing basic stakeholder engagement approaches that are supposed to be at the center of this whole sustainability thing. This excellent, horrifying ‘must read’ outlines how KPMG signed “assurance reports” for a logging project in Canada that described as “minor non-compliances” instances of logging in protected areas, destruction of wildlife habitat and degraded water quality.”

This is Canada, where governance mostly works. Most of the forests we care about saving are in countries with serious governance challenges. I am concerned the accounting firms who are planning to rake it in on net zero hysteria are not up to this task.

Do any have credible social engagement approaches? Do they know about actually managing corruption risk, or only how to design an “FCPA program”? Is there enough money in doing this properly for them to develop/hire this expertise, or nah?