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9.1 From Accountability to Accounting 171
reserves, we will now enter a new ‘age of transparency’ for share- and stakeholders (Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003).
9.1.2 Getting Physical or Monetary?
Changing accounting rules and regulations seems to be easier at the national level as national accountants have some advantages in this regard over their corporate counterparts: they are less confined by accountancy laws and rules, they are not directly affected by their own calculations, and their macroeconomic vantage gives them a broader view and earlier recognition of changing socio-economic priorities. This may explain why corporate ‘financial’ environmental accounting has lagged behind national accounting in addressing environmental and human quality-of-life concerns. On the other hand, environmental ‘management’ accounts (EMA) have been widely propagated, even at the international level [FR 9.2].3
However, EMA face the same physical-monetary dichotomy as their national coun-terparts. Gray (1990, 1992) has been among the first to call for introducing notions like carrying capacity and capital maintenance into corporate accounts. He recognizes the value of both physical impact accounting and ‘sustainable cost’ accounting in mone-tary ‘shadow accounts’. He stops short, though, of advancing an accounting system to this end, considering the difficulties of doing so ‘monumental’.
Schaltegger and Burritt (2000) tackle the monumental task. In their seminal book they distinguish between financial (monetary) and ecological (physical) accounting; they also suggest to ‘take the two together’ in a modular presentation of an environmental accounting framework. This is indeed similar to the conservative modular approach of the revised SEEA (United Nations et al., in prep). Schaltegger and Burrit also adopt a cautious valuation approach,
Including only ‘internal costs’ of outlays for environmental protection in the monetary accounts
Assessing environmental impacts through physical input-output accounts ‘Integrating’ economic and environmental data by means of eco-efficiency indica-tors as the ratio of (monetary) value added and (physical) environmental impact.
9.1.2.1 Physical Accounting
Physical accounting of natural resource use and residuals is the most popular way of meeting stakeholders’ demand for environmental information. Depending on the scope of the analysis, eco-balances assess the physical environmental impacts of
3Financial accounts are typically subject to strict legislative regulation to ensure consistent disclo-sure of the firm’s performance to regulators, investors and stakeholders. Management accounts serve the internal cost analysis of a firm’s activities according to its particular needs and priorities.
172 9 Corporate Accounting: Accounting for Accountability
corporations or local plants, while life cycle analyses focus on product-specific impacts at different production and consumption stages.
Table 9.1 shows the internationally acclaimed eco-balance of a German cor-poration4 as an example of physical input-output accounts. Contrary to conven-tional input-output systems, the eco-balances also present assets and asset changes of equipment, buildings and land – the latter with environmental catego-ries. The flow accounts show material and energy inputs and residual outputs (in addition to product outputs) – similar to the national material flow accounts (MFA) (Section 6.3).
Applying impact analysis to a particular product or production process over the lifetime of the product (from ‘cradle to grave’) is the approach of life cycle analysis (LCA) [FR 9.3]. Plate 9.1 illustrates the production process of jeans from
Table 9.1 Eco-balance, Kunert AG
Stocks
1. Land (sq. m)a 1.1 Sealed
1.2 Green
1.3 Built-over
2. Buildings (sq. m)a 3. Equipment (piece)
Flows
4. Materials/products (kg) 4.1 Raw materials
4.2 Goods
4.3 Auxiliary materials 4.4 Ancillary materials 5. Waste (kg)
5.1 Hazardous 5.2 Other
6. Energy/waste heat (kWh) 7. Water/waste water (cu. m) 8. Air emission (kg)
8.1 NOx 8.2 SO2 8.3 CO2 8.4 Steam
Stocks (12/31/93)
649,143 68,606 448,659 131,878 178,473 16,542
697,183
n/a n/a n/a
Input (1994)
12,931 636 938 11,357 14,447 1,436
1,055,912 3,558,124 2,082,292 3,936,325 1,479,171
118,986,313 428,770
Output (1994)
9,602 2,692 340 6,570 17,923 1,263
8,492,704
2,357,988 62,883 660,225 118,986,313 339,277
100,548 170.132 36,109,594 96,895,400
Stocks (12/31/94)
646,960 65,750 448,386 132,824 185,369 16,715
36,398 3,910 32,488
n/a n/a n/a
Note: aImbalances in stocks 1993/1994 are due to improved data collection in Tunisian and Moroccan factories.
Source: Kunert AG (1994/1995, pp. 14/15).
4In 1995 the Kunert AG’s environmental report was chosen as the ‘world-best’ by SustainAbility Ltd., a London-based research institute, on behalf of the United Nations Environment Programme.
9.1 From Accountability to Accounting 173
Plate 9.1 Life cycle of jeans
Copyright VisLab/Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy; with permission by the copyright holder (See Colour Plates).
the production of cotton to the use and disposal by consumers, with recycling loops back to the consumers as second-hand goods or to reprocessing in cloth manufacture. Detailed analyses could and should assess the environmental impacts at all stages of production and transport, especially with regard to emis-sions and fuel use.
Physical accounting faces of course the problem of comparing the significance of impacts assessed in different measurement units. As in the MFA, the closest physical corporate accounts can come to combining environmental impacts with economic output are resource productivity or eco-efficiency ratios. At the same time, the detail and knowledge available at the micro-level of the enterprise permit a more valid intuitive evaluation of environmental impacts than at the national level. However, full integration is possible only by costing environmental impacts in monetary accounts.
9.1.2.2 Monetary Accounting
On the monetary side of corporate environmental accounting, the less problematic assessment of internal environmental protection expenditures has made greater
174 9 Corporate Accounting: Accounting for Accountability
strides than the valuation of environmental externalities. It is clearly more attractive for a firm to present its environmental protection efforts than to cost its impact on the outside world. Vividly put: ‘who could expect turkeys to vote for Christmas?’ (Bebbington et al., 2001).
It is no surprise that calls for assessing and internalizing the full (private and social) costs of the corporation’s activities come typically from policymakers. Their expectation is that voluntary initiatives by the private sector might obviate unpopu-lar market interventions such as eco-taxes or regulations (see Ch. 13). Agenda 21 of the Rio Earth Summit urges ‘governments, business and industry … [to] work towards … the internalization of environmental costs into accounting and pricing mechanisms’ (United Nations, 1994, ch. 30). Under the heading of ‘getting the prices right’, the EU’s Fifth Environmental Action Programme called for the ‘redefinition of accounting concepts, rules, conventions and methodology’ for full environmental cost accounting (European Commission, 1993). Not much progress seems to have been made since then, except, possibly, when considering accounting for emission rights and emission prevention as assets and liabilities under the EU Emission Trading Scheme (Casamento, 2004). Still, professional associations in the UK and North America elaborated the concepts and methods of full-cost accounting, possibly in anticipation of further governmental regulation [FR 9.2].
9.1.3 Micro-Macro Link
The national accounts are based on double-entry bookkeeping of enterprises. Micro-level corporate accounting that is fully consistent with aggregate national accounting would facilitate statistical data compilation. It would also support economic analysis, in particular of the distribution of income and wealth. One of the SNA handbooks thus explores the relationships between micro- and macro-accounts (United Nations, 2000b). The handbook also reveals numerous differ-ences in accounting concepts, procedures and indicators such as depreciation by firms (for tax purposes) and capital consumption in the national accounts (for assessing the wear and tear of fixed capital).5
Despite these differences, corporate environmental accounting takes approaches that are similar to the greening of the national accounts. They include, in particular,
Corporate ‘parallel’ or ‘shadow’ accounting for externalities (Bebbington et al., 2001), comparable to the SNA’s satellite accounts for the SEEA
5 As the national accounts record transactions between different economic agents, they frequently expand double-entry accounting (for internal production and financial flows) of enterprises into quadruple-entry accounting, adding the same transaction for buyers and sellers (United Nations et al., 1993). The SNA also describes the micro-macro links between business and national accounting and underlying economic theory.
9.2 From Accounting to Management 175
The dichotomy of physical vs. monetary accounting in physical eco-balances and full-cost accounts
The segregation of environmental protection expenditures from corporate overhead costs, and from the SNA’s economic activity classifications in the SEEA.
Corporate and national accountants could indeed learn from each other about their respective methods and the use and usefulness of harmonized green accounting at micro-, meso- and macro-levels. The benefits of this micro-macro link would be
Enhanced compatibility of physical material flow and monetary environmental cost accounts at enterprise, household, regional and national levels
Consistent micro- and macroeconomic strategies and policies, addressing the sustainability of production and consumption patterns of economic sectors, cor-porations and households, and of the overall economic development of regions and countries
Identification and measurement of critical capital maintenance, the key ingredi-ent of strong sustainability (cf. Section 8.4.1), notably through LCA and with a view to exploring aggregation at sectoral and national levels
Improved quality of aggregated environmental stock (ledgers, assets) and flow (input, output) data from harmonized data sources.
The integrated – physical and monetary – accounting system of the SEEA appears to provide the best available framework for further developing the micro-macro link in the fields of environmental-economic accounting and analysis.
9.2 From Accounting to Management
Corporate environmental accounts provide direct data input for corporate environ-mental management. However, the main international management guidelines of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14000 and the European Union’s EMAS (Environmental Management and Audit Scheme) [FR 9.3] do not clearly link environmental accounting and management. Some connections can be envisaged, though, between accounting data and performance indicators proposed by ISO and EMAS for environmental management. Both management guidelines categorize these indicators as
Operational performance indicators of material inputs and outputs Management performance indicators of programme costs, and internal safety and health
Environmental condition indicators of environmental quality and effects on human health and other socio-cultural amenities.
Based on these indicators ISO and EMAS suggest internal and external audits for the evaluation of environmental performance. Such audits serve the information
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