Sustainable development and environmental accounting: the challenge to the economics and accounting profession
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of natural resources accounting in sustainable development. Natural resource accounting is important because the welfare of a nation measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) has several weaknesses.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper achieves this objective by identifying the present status, the constraints and the challenges for the economics and accounting professions.
Findings
The main weakness of GDP as a measure of development is that it does not take into account damages to environmental resources. However, the improvement of the concept to include environmental resource use is made difficult because of the difficulties of measuring environmental damage. The challenge to the economics and accounting profession is to ensure interdisciplinary collaboration, development of a framework to explicitly include the environment, development of credible valuation procedures for the environment, and inclusion of the various ethical positions advanced by various groups on the value of the environment.
Practical implications
Some headway has been made on these issues during the last decade but a major challenge still lies ahead in further improving these approaches so that sustainable development becomes an achievable goal.
Originality/value
This paper brings together diverse views and fusing them together providing a future path for research in environmental accounting to achieve sustainable development.
Keywords
Citation
Herath, G. (2005), "Sustainable development and environmental accounting: the challenge to the economics and accounting profession", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 32 No. 12, pp. 1035-1050. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068290510630999
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited