The announcement in March of this year that the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation has created an International Sustainability Standards Board is, I believe, a watershed moment in the history of investment. It signals that sustainability reporting has come of age. Moreover, it suggests that the nature of accounting has changed. In 1990, only a handful of “responsible investment” research pioneers systematically gathered to analyze the CSR (corporate social responsibility) data of publicly traded companies. I plead guilty to having been among those few. By the mid-1990s, spearheaded by the Global Reporting Initiative, others joined an increasingly crowded field. By…