Corporate considerations for nature - the motivation behind environmental accounting

Annette Becker

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Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, University of Bayreuth (Insititut für Phi...

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Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, University of Bayreuth (Insititut für Philosophie), course: Advanced Arguments in Business Ethics, language: English, abstract: The tendency to show environmental commitment in economic sciences has been growing during the last decades. Terms like green, ecological or environmental economics have been promoted, most famously in the first green wave, when the book "The Limits to Growth" in 1972 and the Brundtland Report "Our Common Future" in 1987, and more recently, when the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006 and the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013, were published. But how come the business world started to care about the environment in the past, without any comprehensive standard forcing them to do so legally on a national or global level? It has been felt that the financial accounting framework was not adequate to provide the information required by various internal and external stakeholders on environmental costs and liabilities, and steps taken by companies to mitigate global warming (Idowu et al. 2013, p. 1035). The endeavour was that the complete costs incurred by an enterprise including external, environmental costs like consumption of non-renewable resources, damages to the environment and degradation of nature, ought to be considered. These external costs, which are also called externalities or societal costs, are caused by the impact of organizational activities, products and services on natural environmental resources and society, but for which the organization doesn't bear any financial liability. In other words, "external costs result from corporate activities but are not internalized through regulations and prices. The boundaries of these costs are not static." (ibid. p. 1035).