Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

ENVIRONMENTAL ACCOUNTING

R.H. Gupta, H.M. Thakar and Teki Suraya

Abstract

These days protection and up-gradation of environment have become key issues all over the World. Due to phenomenal growth of population and industry, the environment which means surroundings and aroundings of you and I where you and I live, has been exploited from many corners. Subsequently numerous changes have been taking place during the recent years. Number of factors and forces are responsible for the destruction of the environment, apart from growing industrialization. Though swift industrialization is essentially pre-requisite for the overall economic growth of a nation, yet is damaging the environment drastically. Which is tolerated by no one and no longer. The Governments of various nations have framed various rules and regulation to protect the environment but implementation process is by and large sluggish and ineffective. To protect the natural resources of the environment and to make the environment green, it is inevitably necessary to evolve the concept of environmental accounting into the business corporate sector.The major shortcoming of conventional accounting is that its sphere is stipulated to only quantitative and monetary aspects. Despite, environment having significant command over a corporate citizen and has performance, environment has not been made a vent into the corporation accounting system, until recently. Gradually in the lmht of evolved wisdom it was considered essential to make an endeavour to incorporate the effect of environmental resources in the entire business functions of a business corporation. Therefore, environmental accounting has come into existence. It is a fruitful attempt to identify and bring to the light, the resources exhausted and costs rendered reciprocally to the environment by a business corporation. Without considering these facts maintaining accounts and interpreting the results there may give a dubious poster of the business corporation. Hence to rectify the erroneous existing accounting system an attempt has been made in the present paper to clarify the basic assumptions in environmental accounting like cost, benefit analysis, bases for economizing natural free goods (Air, Water, Oxygen etc.) which includes shadow pricing, bidding, TMC etc. are discussed. This paper also throws light at the practical flaws of environmental accounting like money measurement accounting concept, determination of price in the absence of mighty market force, lack of uniform mandate amongst the accounting practioners etc.