Managing stakeholders' demand through environmental management accounting: the case of seaports

Abstract

This paper explores the required environmental information according to relevant stakeholders and how this requirement influences environmental management accounting (EMA) practices. By comparing and contrasting empirical evidence collected from in-depth interviews with several key relevant personnel from two seaports, this paper identifies two high salient stakeholders, namely the government agency and foreign co-owner where each of them had demanded detail information of scheduled waste production, and energy and fuel consumption (including carbon emission). Both seaports are found to adopt the EMA framework to assist environmental data collection. The energy and fuel consumption and carbon emission are intensively monitored while not much attention is given on water usage given the absence of definitive stakeholder on water management. Once the cost-savings potential of the information was realised, the collected information are then widely used to enhance efficiency.