2 - Accounting for Sustainability [15 Marks] The world has witnessed the damaging effects of a novel coronavirus (also referred to as COVID-19) since early 2020, leading to the shutting down of many aspects of economic and social life worldwide (Bapuji et al., 2020; Brammer et al., 2020). Although the world has experienced several pandemics from the late twentieth century through to the early twenty-first century, caused by infectious diseases such as Zika fever, Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), avian flu, swine flu, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), the COVID-19 pandemic is more lethal with an extensive global spread aided by today's service- oriented economy, in comparison to previous pandemics (Baker et al., 2020a; Baker et al., 2020b; World Bank, 2020; World Economic Forum [WEF], 2020). For example, the World Bank (2020) predicts that the global economy will shrink by 5.2% in 2020 due to the COVID- 19 pandemic and that it will also experience the deepest recession since the Second World War. In this continuing economic turmoil, COVID-19 has hugely affected the equity market and most stock indices worldwide have fallen (World Economic Forum [WEF], 2020). For example, Baker et al. (2020a) show that while the