Environmental Accounting and Corporate Sustainability: A Research Synthesis

Abstract

The paper examined the extent of environmental accounting and its relationship with corporate sustainability with an ardent focus on controversies, contradictions, gaps and relationships with previous explorations. The researchers adopted an assiduous literature review approach on the diverse perspectives of investigators and scholars through probing into their conceptualizations, empiricism and theoretical underpinnings of industrialized nations, emerging economies and least developed countries. The analysis provides a comprehensive overview of recent studies on multiple dimensions of environmental accounting and their interrelationship with corporate sustainability. We observed that there was a broad gap on the issue of profitability, financial leverage, industry type and social and moral responsibility of environmental accounting. Additionally, we also discovered that the relationship between environmental accounting and corporate sustainability has not been effectively established in emerging economies. Premised on this intriguing findings, it was recommended that standard setters should yield to the incessant calls and proposals canvassed by renowned scholars for directives bordering on the establishment of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on environmental accounting (EA) in order to enhance corporate sustainability (CS).

The Choice of Environmental Management Accounting Practices Adopted by Managers: Evidence from the Hotel Sector in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa

“…In this scenario, hotels are prompted to select EMA practices that in not so long advance financial benefits.69% of the respondents confirmed that EMA practices adopted by their hotel company are mostly hinged on shortterm financial benefits and return. This supports evidence in contemporary literature that EMA is mostly adopted by the corporate sector for financial purposes (Chathurangani & Madhusanka, 2019;Ekundayo & Odhigu, 2021;Gunarathne & Lee, 2015). The respondents explain that the central objective of their business is to attain and increase corporate profitability.…”

“…Customers of hotels in Kwazulu Natal are mostly international tourists (Sucheran, 2018). This reiterates the statement that environmental management practices are most popular in developed and industrialized nations (Ekundayo & Odhigu, 2021;Sucheran (2018). Hence, tourists from international countries prefer hotels implementing EMA practices that can be easily identified by them.…”