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Environmental auditing is becoming increasingly important for business who wish to demonstrate their corporate responsibility and commitment to environmental improvement. It offers a methodology to evaluate the environmental performance of companies and is likely to become increasingly widespread as more and more environmental regulations and codes of practice have to be adhered to in industry. Outlines the benefits of environmental auditing and offers a methodology for undertaking the audit procedure. Examines the aims and objectives of the audit process, analyses incentives to undertake the audit and maps out the practice of implementing the audit. In an analysis of the EU Euro Eco‐management and Audit Scheme, shows how this scheme will increase the attractiveness of environmental auditing to companies who wish to be recognized as leaders in the field.

The consideration of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) has been in existence for more than a decade now, rising to prominence as a result of the upsurge in environmental auditing (EA). Despite the many international claims that auditors are positioned to play a pivotal role in the design and conduct of EA, no previous study has been undertaken in the Libyan context. The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into the preparedness of Libyan financial auditors to handle EA within the conventional auditing framework.

The paper comprises an exploration of the views and experience of 93 practitioners in the 27 largest auditing offices in Tripoli. A questionnaire was chosen for this study. It was pre‐tested by nine members of staff in accounting departments at Libyan universities and 11 practitioners. The final Arabic copies of the questionnaire were distributed in the final survey. The number of questionnaires distributed was 93 and the response rate was 87.1 per cent (usable questionnaires 81).

The results of this research are reflective of contemporary international studies, suggesting that, although the Libyan financial auditors recognised the influence of environmental issues on the different stages of auditing, they are conspicuously absent from EA. This can be attributed to: their lack of competence in such an area; a lack of professional standards and guidance; a lack of research in this area; EA not being required by laws; limited public demand for environmental reports; and the low level of environmental disclosure by Libyan companies.

It is envisaged that this initial study will add to the limited literature on EA in developing countries and provide a useful framework for further studies, especially those in the Arabic region.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of top management’s environmental responsibility audit (ERA) implementation on firms’ investment for environmental protection in China.

The sample comprises firms publicly traded on A-Share in China from 2011 to 2017. The authors used the ordinary least squares regression model to test the relation between ERA implementation and corporate environmental investment.

Firms’ environmental investment increases significantly after the ERA implementation. Compared to state-owned enterprises (SOEs), non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) are more likely to increase their environmental investment after ERA implementation. Moreover, such change is more likely for non-heavily polluting enterprises (non-HPEs) compared to heavily polluting enterprises (HPEs).

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the positive influence of environmental enforcement on corporate behavior, which could serve as reference for regulators on the latest environmental accounting practice in China and other emerging economies.

This paper shows that clear assignment of environmental responsibility and subsequent assessment of environmental performance are contributing factors to effective and efficient implementation of an environmental management system.

Contributing to accounting and environmental management literature, this paper explains how mandated environmental audit incentivizes firms to deal with environmental issues. Because there is no prior research concerning the mandatory implementation of environmental audit in China, this paper is of high-innovatory value by providing a better understanding of environmental auditing and providing an economic explanation for government intervention as an effective means of mitigating environmental degradation in emerging economies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between and corporate environmental responsibility (CER) and audit risk.

A survey participation request was mailed to 5,008 US auditors at random. The request provided a link to an electronic survey. The final sample consists of anonymous responses from 163 auditors.

The authors find that auditors, on average, do not perceive a significant relationship between corporate environmental strengths and audit risk; however, they do perceive an increase in audit risk among firms with corporate environmental concerns. Use of CER in the risk assessment process also varies across types of CER: 15 per cent of auditors use corporate environmental strengths to assess audit risk, while 43 per cent of auditors use corporate environmental concerns to assess audit risk. Perception of the CER/audit risk relationship is a significant determinant of CER use. Finally, both types of CER are found to have average usefulness in the risk assessment process.

The findings are limited to US auditors; results may not be transferable to other countries.

Studies involving the impact of CER on earnings generally involve archival data. By examining the impact of CER on audit risk, using a unique dataset, the authors present a different and timely setting to study the CER/earnings relationship. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to document the relationship between CER and audit risk.

This paper aims to examine the effect of carbon emissions on audit fees. The authors hypothesize that firms in cities with higher carbon emission levels have lower reporting transparency, higher return volatility or are subject to higher reputation risk, causing them to be charged higher audit fees for auditing services.

The authors use panel data of 25,960 firm-year observations from a sample of Chinese firms. The carbon emission data for each Chinese city are obtained from the China Emission Accounts and Datasets for Emerging Economies. This paper adopts a multiple regression model to study the impact of carbon emissions on audit fees.

The authors find that firms located in cities with higher carbon emission levels and firms with more carbon emissions are charged, on average, a higher audit fee. This audit fee effect of carbon risk is transmitted by lessened information transparency and elevated financial risk within these firms. This paper shows that auditors consider carbon risk in their audit fee decisions and other factors that could influence audit risk and effort.

This study draws a connection between carbon emissions and audit fees. It is especially relevant due to the increasing importance of environmental factors in the audit risk assessment. In addition, the findings suggest that a firm implementing a proactive environmental strategy benefits the economy and decreases the costs to the firm for services such as auditing.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the off-office audit of natural resource assets on the prevention and control of water pollution against a background of big data using a differences-in-differences model.

This study constructs a differences-in-differences model to evaluate the policy effects of off-office audit based on panel data from 11 cities in Anhui Province, China, from 2011 to 2017, and analyzes the dynamic effect of the audit and intermediary effect of industrial structure.

The implementation of the audit system can effectively reduce water pollution. Dynamic effect analysis showed that the audit policy can not only improve the quality of water resources but can also have a cumulative effect over time. That is, the prevention and control effect on water pollution is getting stronger and stronger. The results of the robustness test verified the effectiveness of water pollution prevention and control. However, the results of the influence mechanism analysis showed that the mediating effect of the industrial structure was not obvious in the short term.

These findings shed light on the effect of the off-office audit of natural resource assets on the prevention and control of water pollution, and provide a theoretical basis for the formulation of relevant environmental policies. Furthermore, these findings show that the implementation of the audit system can effectively reduce water pollution, which has practical significance for the sustainable development of China's economy against the background of big data.

This study quantitatively analyzes the policy effect of off-office auditing from the perspective of water resources based on a big data background, which differs from the existing research that mainly focuses on basic theoretical analysis.

While corporations may embrace the concepts of social and environmental responsibility, numerous examples exist to show corporations claiming to act sustainably and responsibly, while simultaneously showing disregard for the communities in which they operate and causing considerable environmental damage.

This chapter argues that such activities illustrate a particular notion of Baumol’s (1990) criminal entrepreneurialism where both creative and constructive compliance combine to subvert environmental regulation and its enforcement.

This chapter employs a case study approach assessing the current corporate environmental responsibility landscape against the reality of corporate environmental offending. Its case study shows seemingly repeated environmental offending by Shell Oil against a backdrop of the company claiming to have integrated environmental monitoring and scrutiny into its operating procedures.

The chapter concludes that corporate assertion of environmental credentials is itself often a form of criminal entrepreneurship where corporations embrace voluntary codes of practice and self-regulation while internally promoting the drive for success and profitability and/or avoidance of the costs of true environmental compliance deemed too high. As a result, this chapter argues that responsibility for environmental damage requires regulation to ensure corporate responsibility for environmental damage.

The chapter employs a green criminological perspective to its analysis of corporate social responsibility and entrepreneurship. Thus, it considers not only just strict legal definitions of crime and criminal behaviour but also the overlap between the legal and the illegal and the preference of governments to use administrative or civil penalties as tools to deal with corporate environmental offending.

Environmental law has developed rapidly in the twentieth century, but Britain lacks an environmental code. Cost of compliance is likely to rise rapidly as the number of statuary offences increases. Environmental legislation gives regulators the power to rectify damage caused by polluters. As a result companies need to develop effective responses. Environmental auditing (EA) is a sub‐set of corporate responsibility reporting of which there are a number of theoretical perspectives. However, ISO 14000 has recently emerged, which will determine organizations’ approaches to environmental reporting. EA imposes costs on organizations and many have found difficulty in implementing such systems. Some organizations see environmentalism as an opportunity to pursue a managerial agenda. If this is the case then EA may degenerate into a marketing tool.

Increasing environmental pollution and destruction have damaged sustainability in polluting societies and organizations. For this reason, various environmental management programs have recently been developed by governments and the environmental protection agencies (EPAs) to control and reduce environmental pollution. One of these programs is environmental audit (EA), which has not been fully implemented yet in developing countries and it has many disadvantages. It seems that one of the reasons for the lack of perfect implementation of EA in these countries is the lack of adequate review of the factors affecting its implementation. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors affecting EA implementation and then analysis of causal relationships between them.

Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique was used to identify causal relationships of factors affecting EA implementation. Based on the literature review and interviewing nine experts in EA, 17 factors were identified to influence EA implementation. Six experts were selected for the evaluation using snowball sampling method. Using the DEMATEL approach, a cause and effect relationship diagram was generated through which the effect of factors was analyzed.

Seventeen factors were categorized in terms of cause and effect, and the interrelationships of factors were also analyzed. “Reducing environmental impacts and improving environmental performance,” “obtaining environmental management system certificates” and “contributing to the environmental goals of investment projects” are the most prominent factors on the basis of their prominent score.

Analysis in the research is highly dependent on expert judgments and opinions may be biased. However, the initial matrix obtained from the experts is hindered by the ambiguity about some relationships. But this can be improved by using fuzzy and gray set theories. The factors used for the analysis may not be comprehensive and other researchers may find other factors.

Identifying the factors affecting EA implementation and analyzing causal relationships between them can be a guide and help governments to improve the implementation of EA or even develop this policy by being aware of the effect of the factors analyzed.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no comprehensive study of factors affecting EA implementation has been undertaken; this study is the first to identify these factors and analyze them using DEMATEL. Therefore, it is suggested that governments and EPAs in the policies focus on the significant factors.

Today, with the increasing involvement of the environment and human beings business units, paying attention to fulfilling social responsibility obligations while making a profit has become increasingly necessary for achieving sustainable development goals. Attention to profit by organizations should not be without regard to their social and environmental performance. Social responsibility accounting (SRA) is an approach that can pay more attention to the social and environmental performance of companies, but it has many barriers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify barriers to SRA implementation and provide strategies to overcome these barriers.

In this study, the authors identify barriers to social responsibility accounting implementation and provide strategies to overcome these barriers. By literature review, 12 barriers and seven strategies were identified and approved using the opinions of six academic experts. Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) has been used to identify significant barriers and find textual relationships between them. The fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method has been used to identify and rank strategies for overcoming these barriers. This study was undertaken in Iran (an emerging market). The data has been gathered from 18 experts selected using purposive sampling and included CEOs of the organization, senior accountants and active researchers well familiar with the field of social responsibility accounting.

Based on the results of this study, the cultural differences barrier was introduced as the primary and underlying barrier of the social responsibility accounting barriers model. At the next level, barriers such as “lack of public awareness of the importance of social responsibility accounting, lack of social responsibility accounting implementation regulations and organization size” are significant barriers to social responsibility accounting implementation. Removing these barriers will help remove other barriers in this direction. In addition, the results of the TOPSIS method showed that “mandatory regulations, the introduction of guidelines and social responsibility accounting standards,” “regulatory developments and government incentive schemes to implement social responsibility accounting,” as well as “increasing public awareness of the benefits of social responsibility accounting” are some of the essential social responsibility accounting implementation strategies.

The findings of the study have implications for both professional accounting bodies for developing the necessary standards and for policymakers for adopting policies that facilitate the implementation of social responsibility accounting to achieve sustainability.

This paper creates a new perspective on the practical implementation of social responsibility accounting, closely related to improving environmental performance and increasing social welfare through improving sustainability.

Experts believe that the strategies mentioned above will be very effective and helpful in removing the barriers of the lower level of the model. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, for the first time, this study develops a model of social responsibility accounting barriers and ranks the most critical implementation strategies.