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Environmental Accounting

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Environmental Accounting
Environmental accounting is the ‘use of traditional accounting- and finance principles to compute the environmental costs of commercial and industrial decisions.’ Accountants have the role to help business’ understand the implications of decisions that affect the environment, this in turn will help to ‘deliver commercial benefits and safeguard the natural assets the business depends on.’
The key issues involved are those that effect the environment in a negative manner, therefore sustainability is vital. Sustainability brings positive outcomes to a company’s bottom line as it reduces a company’s carbon footprint which leads to ‘tangible bottom line benefits’.
Due to sustainability being the underlining word, investors are now calling for ‘more meaningful non-financial information to sit alongside the audited financial accounts’. Investors are asking for this because the overall performance of a company is not just based on the financial accounts anymore, therefore there is hope for a ‘global framework for accounting and sustainability’ which will provide the required information the investors seek.
Numerous accounting organisations like the ICAEW, TEEB for Business Coalition, Accounting for Sustainability and the IAASB are all trying to encourage more environmental friendly procedures to occur from business’ whether that be ‘developing a standard on greenhouse gases and robust report writing’, or researching into ‘measuring how much companies should pay to compensate for their negative impact on the environment.’ All these organisations and many more have important roles of how business’ will make important decisions in the future due to the world of report writing of business’ accounts potentially changing dramatically. Furthermore, events like the COP 15 are extremely key as the COP 15 was attempting for all nations to sign a treaty

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