Meet Dr Tanya Fiedler, Senior Lecturer and Scientia Fellow at the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response, whose research bridges the gap between climate science, accounting, and finance.
I have always had a deep love of nature, but it took me a while to find a way to incorporate that into my work, as I initially trained as a classical pianist. As a young adult, I then transitioned to train as an outdoor guide. This experience deepened my sense of connection to wild places, as I spent weeks at a time walking, climbing and inhabiting remote mountain regions. The raw beauty of such places still sustains me in ways that nothing else quite can.
I am also a pragmatist, however, and over time, I became increasingly convinced that the only way to protect these spaces was to find a way to work with business in service of the environment.
So, I earned a master’s in environmental management, after which I worked at Energetics, a dedicated climate consultancy. While working there with engineers and scientists, as well as with accounting firms and clients, it became increasingly apparent to me that a gap existed between the very different cultural and linguistic norms, practices and technologies of these two communities. This spurred my interest in the need to build a bridge between the world of science and finance and led me to pursue a PhD in accounting.
Over the last decade, rapid changes in the global regulatory environment mean companies are now required to identify, measure and report on the financial risks they face from a warming climate. This brings the need to bridge the gaps between science and finance to the front and centre of accounting work.
As a qualitative researcher, I often engage with industry professionals. What I consistently hear is that translating information from the climate to accounting is difficult. It is difficult for many reasons—because the data is foreign, because internal systems designed for financial data do not cope well, for example, with climate model projections, or because they don’t have the staff capable of doing this work, etc.
But, as an interdisciplinary researcher, I also engage extensively with climate scientists. They tell me the tools and technologies used in climate science have been developed to understand how increasing emissions affect the climate.
However, to satisfy the changes in reporting requirements, businesses now need localised data to understand the impact of climate change on their specific operations, assets, and supply chains. So, there is a fundamental disconnect between what climate models can provide and the more specific data businesses require.
My research has been dedicated to understanding and communicating these challenges, and more recently, I have begun exploring potential solutions to bridge this gap.
Because the work I do is so engaged and deeply interdisciplinary, I have struggled to work in traditional academic silos. For this reason, I feel incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity to be a part of the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk and Response while still having a ‘home’ in the School of Accounting, Audit & Taxation at UNSW Business School. Now, I feel my work truly bridges climate science and business, by bringing questions of relevance from industry to academia and examining problems and solutions of interest across the disciplines of science, accounting and finance.
I have recently been working, for example, with the accounting firm Ernst & Young, to deepen our understanding of the types of work that are needed to enable the translation of climate information into the financial statements of publicly listed companies.
On another project, I am collaborating with UNSW Institute for Climate Risk and Response Director Professor Ben Newell, The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes Director Professor Andy Pitman, and a large financial institution on research that seeks to understand how the radical uncertainties climate change brings can be effectively integrated into their internal decision-making processes.
I hope, in my role, to drive impactful research with collaborators in accounting and science but also to help build a new generation of industry professionals and academics capable of building their own bridge.