Professor Carol Adams

Biography

Website https://drcaroladams.net/

Carol has a financial audit background qualifying as a member of ICAS (Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland) with KPMG. She is Professor of Accounting at Durham University Business School in the UK and holds a part time position at Swinburne. She holds an MSc in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics and a PhD in International Corporate Reporting from the University of Glasgow. She has held senior management positions in Universities including as Head of School, Faculty Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor and has previously held Professor of Accounting positions at Monash University and the University of Glasgow and has served on a number of Boards in the finance, education and not-for-profit sectors. She has also served as a member of the Sustainability Advisory Board for Fuji Xerox Australia and Sustainability Leadership Advisor to the Commonwealth Education Trust. She is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (FAICD) and has passed the Company Directors and the Mastering the Boardroom courses having won an Aust. Govt. scholarship for the latter.

Carol Adams’ work is concerned with the role of accounting and reporting in the relationships between business, society and the environment. For over two decades she has sought to advance practice and policy with respect to integrating sustainability considerations into organisations through applied research, leadership, standard setting, advisory work and educating the next generation of business leaders. A number of her articles in academic accounting journals of international standing are ranked in the top 20 most cited articles in the journal in which they are published and her work has been in the news. She is founding editor of the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal. Her work has been cited approx. 9,000 times. She is Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria and Honorary Research Fellow at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.

Carol consults to multinational corporations and other organisations on corporate reporting and integrating sustainability into business practices. Recent assignments have included work with Royal Bank of Scotland and Dairy Australia on sustainability reporting and Cbus Superannuation fund on integrated reporting. (The Cbus Annual Integrated Report 2016 won the AIST’s best corporate report award.) Carol has led the development of award winning sustainability reports, management and governance processes

Carol is currently a member of the Stakeholder Council of the Global Reporting Initiative, the Institute of Chartered Accountant’s of Scotland’s (ICAS) Sustainability Committee and the Climate Disclosure Standards Board’s Technical Working Group. She was a member of the International Integrated Reporting Council’s Capitals Technical Collaboration Group.