By Calvin Mugume – Chief Finance Officer, Next Media
It’s tempting to think of climate change as something that happens out there: rising seas, melting ice caps, and the occasional wildfire dancing too close to a celebrity’s Malibu mansion. But as the existential crisis of our age quietly makes its way into every spreadsheet and budget meeting, it becomes clearer that no industry gets to sit this one out, not even the media.
Now, the media industry is used to being at the center of attention. After all, it films the center, narrates the center, and then packages the center into a content calendar. But increasingly, it is also discovering that it is the center. Not just in what it chooses to cover - or ignore - but in how it operates. Behind the cameras, beyond the headlines, another story is unfolding. This one features an unlikely protagonist: the accountant.
Yes, the accountant. Not the dashing anchor or the viral TikTok pundit. The person with the spreadsheets. In this new chapter of our planetary drama, the bean counters may just turn out to be the quiet heroes.
Counting the Invisible: Carbon as Line Item
Media organizations are sprawling operations. They broadcast, stream, publish, and shuttle teams across continents to capture footage of the world unraveling in real time. Every light bulb in a studio, every trip to cover a story, every server that keeps your favorite podcast running - these are all emissions. And emissions, as it turns out, can be counted.
This is where accountants come in. They’re no longer just reconciling travel receipts or forecasting next quarter’s ad revenue. They are carbon bookkeepers—tracking energy consumption, calculating emissions from production, and spotting the invisible costs embedded in each broadcast. In other words, they’re turning the abstract into the accountable.
From Footnotes to Front Page: The ESG Awakening
Sustainability reporting used to be optional. A sort of polite afterthought in the annual report, tucked between “Community Outreach” and “Risk Factors.” No longer.
Today, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting is moving center stage, and accountants are the ones ensuring it’s not just greenwashing with better fonts. They verify emissions data, ensure alignment with increasingly complex global standards - GRI, ISSB, TCFD - and check that what’s said in the sustainability section doesn’t contradict what's hidden in the footnotes. Because if you’re going to tell the world you're going green, you’d better mean it, and prove it.
The Climate Crisis as a Budget Line
Climate change isn’t only an environmental story—it’s a financial one. Think supply chain delays, climate regulation fines, and unpredictable weather wreaking havoc on infrastructure. These aren’t hypotheticals; they’re line items.
Accountants are now risk assessors, modeling scenarios where climate change isn’t just inconvenient but expensive. They’re advising media companies on how to build climate resilience into budgets—not just surviving the next fiscal year, but the next flood, fire, or drought. It’s a different kind of forecasting, one where the weather section and the balance sheet start to look eerily similar.
Investing in a Future That Isn’t On Fire
Then comes the money. If media companies are going to swap diesel-powered OB vans for electric fleets or replace energy-guzzling servers with greener cloud solutions, someone has to run the numbers. That’s the accountant’s job: to figure out if the green option is also the smart one. Spoiler: increasingly, it is.
They assess the return on investment not just in financial terms, but in reputational capital and regulatory relief. It’s a delicate balancing act: what saves the planet must also save the budget. And that, as it turns out, is a spreadsheetable proposition.
Trust, Truth, and Tallying Up
At a time when the public’s trust in media is about as stable as a melting glacier, credibility matters. It’s not enough to run a climate segment or partner with an NGO. Audiences, regulators, and advertisers are watching what you do, not just what you say. This is where the accountant becomes the conscience of the organization. Not the loudest voice, perhaps - but the one making sure the receipts add up.
The Climate Accountant Is In
So, where does that leave us? With an unusual truth: the future of climate credibility in media may rest not in the editorial meetings or the social media metrics—but in the finance department.
Accountants are not just counting the cost of climate change. They’re helping define it. And in an industry that prides itself on holding others to account, it’s only right that someone’s holding the industry to account too.
And if that someone happens to wear a green eyeshade and speak fluent IFRS, even better.