حسابداری مديريت محيط زيست و تاثير آن در مدیریت کربن
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Review of EMA development and application
3- Hypothesis development
4- Research method
5- Results analysis
6- Discussion and conclusion
Appendix A. Survey questionnaire about the application of EMA tools (An excerpt from Corporate Sustainability Barometer survey)
Appendix B. The effect of EMA tools on carbon management and disclosure quality
Appendix C. Effects of different groups of EMA tools on carbon management and disclosure quality
References
Abstract
Along with the development of environmental management accounting (EMA) in the past decade, a variety of management accounting and control tools have been designed and implemented to improve the measurement and management of corporate environmental performance and information. While the importance of EMA to corporate sustainability has been increasingly acknowledged, extant literature has drawn little attention on assessing and understanding EMA application and its effectiveness on the quality of carbon emission management and disclosure. Using data gathered of 114 large firms in the US, Germany, Australia and Japan, we find that many firms have applied some EMA tools, yet only a few have applied the full range of EMA tools. The empirical analysis reveals that EMA application has a significantly positive impact on both corporate carbon management and disclosure quality. Further analysis specifies that audit and benchmarking tools as well as control tools have significant effects on carbon management and disclosure, while for measurement tools no significant effects could be observed. Based on the results, implications are developed for management education and practitioners, which can help managers to make better informed choices for the application of EMA tools.
Introduction
The annual Earth Overshoot Day marks the day on which human induced pollution exceeds the carrying capacity the earth provides for a given year. Constantly, this day is reached far before the end of the year and the overshoot increases each year (Posthuma et al., 2014; Worland, 2015). Carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions are one of the main drivers of this overshoot and large corporations are the main emitters of greenhouse gases, both historically, but also at present (CDP, 2013; Heede et al., 2014). To measure environmental impacts including carbon emissions, environmental management accounting (EMA) has received growing attention for the past decades (e.g., Christ and Burritt, 2013; Ferreira et al., 2010; Gibson and Martin, 2004; Passetti et al., 2014; Schaltegger and Burritt, 2000) and a variety of EMA tools such as material flow cost accounting (Christ and Burritt, 2015; Strobel and Redmann, 2002), eco-control (Henri and Journeault, 2010) and the sustainability balanced scorecard (Hansen and Schaltegger, 2016), have been designed and increasingly implemented to reduce the environmental impacts of companies. While the focus of previous environmental and social accounting and reporting research is predominantly on environmental disclosure (Parker, 2005; Schaltegger et al., 2013), EMA has been increasingly used and investigated as a company-internal approach to support the quality of environmental management in corporate practice (Adams, 2002; Burritt et al., 2002). It has been acknowledged that EMA can play a significant role in spurring operational as well as organisational change towards reducing corporate environmental impacts (Bennett et al., 2003; Ferreira et al., 2010; Masanet-Llodra, 2006).