Corporate considerations for nature – the motivation behind environmental accounting

Exposé Écrit pour un Séminaire / Cours , 2013 , 23 Pages , Note: 1,7

Philosophie - Divers

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).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
1.1 Economics, business and externalities
1.2 Corporate considerations
1.3 Environmental accounting
1.4 Environmental management accounting

2. Business case PUMA
2.1 PUMA’s Environmental Profit & Loss account
2.2 PUMA’s environmental impacts and E P&L results
2.3 Critical review

3. Theoretical framework: The relationship between the corporation and society
3.1 Background theories
3.2 Legitimacy theory
3.3 Stakeholder theory
3.4 Critical review

4. Reflection

Bibliography

Appendix

• Université: University of Bayreuth (Insititut für Philosophie)
• Cours: Advanced Arguments in Business Ethics
• Note: 1,7
• Auteur: Annette Becker (Auteur)
• Année de publication: 2013
• Pages: 23
• N° de catalogue: V264163
• ISBN (ebook): 9783656534754
• ISBN (Livre): 9783656537984
• Langue: anglais
• mots-clé: Philosophie, Unternehmensethik, Wirtschaftsethik, Business Ethics, Economic Ethics, carbon accounting, ecological accounting, environmental accounting, green accounting, profit & loss acount, PUMA, corporation, environmental management accounting, financial accounting, environmental financial accounting, GRI, tripple bottom line, GAAP, ICCP