GOING beyond number crunching and providing assurance, advisory, and tax services to their clients, accounting firm Isla Lipana & Co./PricewaterhouseCoopers has embarked on a new challenge - helping save earth from further environmental degradation.

Armed not with calculators and spreadsheets, but with their environ-mentalist’s caps, partners, managers and staff stepped out of their offices to contribute their share in the global effort to reduce greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

"What does an accounting firm have to do with the climate change effort? Like the rest of the world, we believe that we should perform simple but significant tasks to somehow help protect the environment from further destruction," said Tammy H. Lipana Isla Lipana, chairman and senior partner.

The first step toward the objective was to work with the klima Climate Change Center, a unit of the Manila Observatory which raises public awareness and trains individuals and institutions on climate change issues.

Isla Lipana is the first accounting firm to request the klima Climate Change Center to give its people a briefing on the science, impact, and solutions to climate change.

"It is a first for klima to partner with an accounting and auditing firm to promote awareness on climate change. The lecture was conducted prior to a tree-potting activity to familiarize the employees with the basics of climate change. This is just the beginning of Isla Lipana’s environmental activities. In the next few years, climate change will be the focus of their corporate social responsibility program," Emmi B. Capili of klima said.

Capili and other speakers including lawyer Angela Consuelo Ibay of klima, Dr. Rosa Perez of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), and Dr. Rodel Lasco of the International Centre for Research on Agro-Forestry (ICRAF)- Philippine briefed over a hundred Isla Lipanan partners and accounts on various facets of climate change. PAGASA and ICRAF are research partners of the Manila Observatory.

After the lectures, they got close to the earth for a tree-potting activity at the La Mesa Ecopark where Lipana headed the potting of 220 ipil seeds. Planting trees, according to klima, is one effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This, Lipana said, is not a short-term program. A culture of environmentalism is what the accounting firm will strive to achieve through simple steps such as using mugs instead of paper cups in the office, and recycling used paper into memo pads. The company also held a Christmas décor contest using recyclable material to encourage the re-use of waste materials among its employees. Another activity is the showing of the popular documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," for which Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize.