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Abstract: Environmental management accounting serves as a mechanism for identifying and measuring the full spectrum of environmental costs of current production processes and the economic benefits of pollution prevention or cleaner processes, and to integrate these costs and benefits into day-to-day business decision-making. For the last decade, corporate environmental accounting has gained increased importance in practice, of which cost accounting receives most attention. Limits of traditional financial and cost accounting methods to reflect efforts of organizations towards sustainability and to provide management with information needed to make sustainable business decisions have been broadly recognized. Information on environmental performance of organizations might be available to some extent, but, decision-makers of internal company, as well as those in public authorities, are seldom able to link environmental information to economic variables and are crucially lacking environmental cost information. As a consequence, decision makers fail to recognize the economic value of natural resources as assets, and the business and financial value of good environmental performance. Beyond "goodwill" initiatives, a few market-based incentives exist to integrate environmental concerns in decision-making. This paper gives an overview of the approaches of environmental management accounting and we analyze environmental cost in condition by current economic context.
Keywords: environmental management accounting, environmental cost, environmental performance, corporate environmental accounting
1. Introduction
Traditional tools used for planning economic and development policies cannot identify environmental costs. The concept of lastingness actually involves restrictions on the exploitation of natural resources and the modification of the lifestyle, in sourcing the maintenance costs of the natural heritage and the preservation of the natural balance. In order to reach this objective, all the decision making processes must be improved for the purposes of increasing responsibility and accountability in relation to environmental issues at all the hierarchical levels. The identification and acknowledgement of the environmental costs associated with a product, process or system are important for making good managerial decisions. The achievement of the objectives related to the reduction of environmental expenses, the expansion of the recovery processes and the improvement of the environmental performances involve paying special attention to current and potential environmental costs. This led to the development of Environmental Management Accounting - EMA over the past decades (Bennett et al., 2013).
2. What is environmental management accounting?
Environmental...