حسابداری مدیریت محیط زیست و تأثیر آن در مدیریت کربن و کیفیت افشاء Environmental management accounting and its effects on carbon management and disclosure quality

1. 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). More recently, the usefulness of EMA has been explored and discussed in the context of corporate carbon management and accounting (Ascui, 2014; Burritt et al., 2011; Schaltegger and Csutora, 2012; Stechemesser and Günther, 2012). Governments around the world have attempted to drive corporate responses to climate change through the introduction of emission trading schemes and/or taxes, abatement and disclosure regulation that aim to reduce carbon emissions. Under the current European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), carbon pricing or other related carbon reduction mechanisms, it has become increasingly important for corporations to account for carbon emissions (Bell, 2017; Bowen and Wittneben, 2011; Engels, 2009; King, 2014; Qian and Schaltegger, 2017). The expectation that a first step towards reducing corporate carbon emissions is to improve transparency and disclosure of such emissions, has led to the establishment of initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The CDP collects and publishes (voluntary) disclosure of the greenhouse gas emissions of the world’s largest corporations.