Environmental Management Accounting

Abstract

Living with carrying capacity of natural resources of the Earth and keeping and improving the quality of human life are the most important environmental issues that we face today. Implementation of numerous arrangements to decrease the negative effects of industrialization have become a serious current issue. These regulations aim to push responsibility to the firms for the wellbeing of the public. Accounting, which is the language of business in numbers, needs to complete the adoption to the new situation for producing environmentally related information. Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) is needed as an application of accounting that is concerned with the environmentally induced impacts of companies, measured in monetary units or in physical units. In this chapter, the emergence of environmental information is discussed, and it is followed by definition and framework of environmental accounting, environmental costs, and EMA. In addition, the new environmental issues, especially in international financial reporting standards, are presented.