A debate on environmental management accounting [articol]

Abstract

Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) refers to a set of accounting and performance tools dedicated to companies’ actions towards improvement of their environmental impact. Furthermore, EMA deals exclusively with the company’s internal costs, as it does not include the external costs of individuals, society, or the economic environment over which the company has no decision-making power. It is recognised that EMA is a relatively new tool in environmental management, which can be defined as the identification, collection, estimation, analysis, internal reporting, and use of information regarding materials and energy flow and environmental costs for both conventional and environmental decision-making process within an organisation. Thus, EMA incorporates and integrates two of the three milestones of sustainable development (environmental and economics dimensions), as they relate to an organisation’s internal decisional process.