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This study investigated the visibility of carbon emissions allowances accounting in the financial reports of 32 clean development mechanism (CDM) projects in the UAE to uncover the obstacles to setting consistent standards for carbon emission accounting. As carbon emissions are monetized as credits, consistent accounting standards can aid decision-makers in the development of carbon emission mitigation strategies.

This study used a grounded theoretical framework for exploring the terms used in the policy documents of international accounting bodies regarding accounting standards and guidelines for carbon emission credits. Raw qualitative data were gathered, and an inductive approach was used by analyzing documents from various sources using the qualitative data text analysis software QDA Miner 6.

The findings showed that the financial statement reports of the corporations did not include disclosure of the carbon credit account. This omission was due to the lack of global standardization of carbon credit accounts and emission allowance recognition. This may hinder the production of a comprehensive report containing accurate and valuable financial information relevant to all stakeholders.

The study is among the first to use a grounded theoretical framework to investigate whether corporations are applying common standards and guidelines for carbon emissions accounting.

A fully functioning carbon accounting system must be based on measurement that is materially accurate, consistent over space and time, and incorporates data uncertainty. However, achieving these goals is difficult because current carbon accounting efforts are spread across three distinct organisational fields, each prioritising different goals. This paper aims to address these issues.

The authors identified three fields drawn together by the science of how carbon emissions can be measured, the social practices of carbon accounting, and accountability within the global carbon governance system. The authors hosted a workshop, and invited representatives participating in each of the organisational fields to highlight the contentious conversations within their field. The authors facilitated an across‐field exploration of whether and how to achieve accuracy, consistency and certainty in carbon accounting.

It was found that there are tensions between accuracy, consistency and certainty in carbon accounting both within and across organisational fields. Framing the evolution of carbon accounting as negotiation between these goals across fields yields powerful implications for addressing current challenges in carbon accounting.

The authors provide guidance to policymakers on how to recognise legitimate uncertainty in carbon management science, manage the cost‐benefits of policy and reporting mechanisms, and ensure actual greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

This paper exploits the unusual approach of integrating carbon accounting across levels of analysis, from the molecular level through processes, organisations, industries and nations. This approach should help scientific, corporate and policy decision‐makers move towards a more fully functioning carbon accounting system.

The purpose of this paper is to apply regulatory mix theory as a framework for investigating the use of management accounting techniques by Australian large listed companies in constraining their carbon emissions.

Semi-structured interviews are conducted with senior managers involved with managing their companies’ carbon emission risks. Analysis of the interview data is undertaken with a view to provision of insight to the impact of the regulatory framework imposed to deal with carbon emissions.

The findings reveal that regulation impacting companies’ economic interests rather than requiring mere disclosure compliance is much more likely to be behind focusing top management and board attention and use of management accounting techniques to set targets, measure performance and incentivise emission mitigation. However, there remains much scope for increased use of accounting professionals and accounting techniques in working towards a carbon-constrained economy.

The usual limitations associated with interpretation of interview data are applicable.

Under-use of management accounting techniques is likely to be associated with less than optimal constraint of carbon emissions.

Carbon emissions are accepted as being involved in harmful climate change. To the extent effective techniques are under-utilised in constraining emissions, harmful consequences for society are likely to be heightened unnecessarily.

The topic and data collected are original and provide valuable insights into the dynamics of management accounting technique use in managing carbon emissions.

Carbon management accounting (CMA) is one part of sustainability accounting designed to provide information for the management of carbon dioxide (CO₂) releases. Adopting the contingency framework, this paper aims to examine the contextual antecedents that influence CMA adoption in Ghanaian firms.

The paper tests seven contextual dimensions, namely, strategy, structure, size, environmental management system (EMS), decentralization, technology and perceived environmental uncertainty, on CMA adoption from a survey of 125 accountants.

Consistent with prior literature, organizational strategy, structure, environmental management accounting (EMA), firm size, technology and perceived environmental uncertainty were found to be positively associated with CMA adoption and hence support contingency theory. However, a relationship between decentralization and EMA adoption was not supported by the sample data. Also, the existence of CMA systems was found to be low in the sample firms, although more than half of the respondents have EMS.

The study is limited to Ghana hence possible generalization of the results is limited. Further exploration of contingency-based research in other emerging economies would provide valuable insights on CMA adoption and practices to contribute to the CMA literature.

The findings suggest that although CMA adoption and practices is low in the sampled firms, both contextual and environmental factors play a vital role in the adoption of CMA in developing economies, as it pertains to the generic management accounting systems. Policies governing CMA practice should incorporate organizational contextual factors.

The paper presents preliminary empirical evidence on the state of adoption and practice of CMA from an emerging economy perspective, an area which lacks empirical investigation both in the EMA and the carbon accounting domain. It draws considerable novelty on the basis that despite the growing interest in climate change-based research empirical works on CO₂ emissions conducted exclusively from management accounting perspective, and in developing economies in particular, have been scant. The paper extends the contingency theory framework from conventional practices to the EMA field.

The purpose of this paper is to draw out the accounting implications of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) Act in Australia.

An analytical approach is undertaken to ascertain the (accounting) practice and research implications of the NGER Act.

Accounting researchers, especially those with interests in social and environmental issues, have a critical role to play in highlighting the potential of the accounting practice in managing, and providing accountability over, carbon emissions, facilitated via the NGER Act. A number of opportunities in social and environmental accounting research are also identified in this paper.

The paper highlights that the NGERS legislation which requires reporting of carbon emissions by affected parties has a number of implications for the accounting practice.

The paper relates a practical issue, in this case the NGER Act, to accounting and suggests that the accounting process can play a critical role in organizational attempts to manage, communicate and price carbon emissions.

This paper aims to set out several of the key issues and areas of the inter‐disciplinary field of climate change research based in accounting and accountability, and to introduce the papers that compose this AAAJ special issue.

The paper provides an overview of issues in the science of climate, as well as an eclectic collection of independent and inter‐disciplinary contributions to accounting for climate change. Through additional accounting analysis, and a shadow carbon account, it also illustrates how organisations and nations account for and communicate their greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints and emissions behaviour.

The research shows that accounting for carbon and other GHG emissions is immensely challenging because of uncertainties in estimation methods. The research also shows the enormity of the challenge associated with reducing those emissions in the near future.

The paper surveys past work on a wide variety of perspectives associated with climate change science, politics and policy, as well as organisational and national emissions and accounting behaviour. It provides an overview of challenges in the area, and seeks to set an agenda for future research that remains interesting and different.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to illustrate the way in which carbon emissions are given calculative agency. The authors contribute to sociology of quantification with a specific focus on the performativity of the carbon number as it was introduced to the organization’s capital investment accounts. In following an intangible gas to a physical amount and then to a dollar value, the authors used categories from the sociology of quantification (Espeland and Stevens, 2008) to explore the persuasive attributes of the newly created number and the way it changed the work of actors, including the way they reacted and viewed authority.

An empirical case study in a large Australian water utility drawing on insights from the sociology of calculation.

The authors present empirics on the calculative appeal of the carbon emissions number, how it came into being and its performative (or reactive) effects. The number disciplined behaviour and acted like a boundary object, while at the same time, enroled allies through its aesthetic appeal in management accounting system designs. In framing the empirics, the authors were able to highlight how the carbon number became a visible actor in the newly emergent and evolving carbon market.

This paper provides an empirical framing that continues the project of writing the sociology of calculation into accounting.

This study contributes to the sociology of quantification in accounting with an empirical framing device to reveal the representational work of a number and how it expands as it becomes implicated in broader networks of calculation.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on carbon accounting as one aspect of accounting for impacts on the environmental capital and to detail the “convergence” process between two emergent corporate carbon management accounting approaches within a multinational company. In contrast to the reporting stakeholder and regulatory focus, company-internal issues of carbon accounting have so far rarely been investigated in depth. Based on a qualitative analysis of this in-depth case study, questions about what could be considered an effective carbon management accounting system are raised.

The research has been conducted with an in-depth case study, using participant observation (Spradley, 1980). The authors follow a pragmatic research approach, and the proposal of Malmi and Granlund (2009) “to create theories useful for practice is to solve practical problems with practitioners and synthesize the novel solutions to a more general form”.

This case study demonstrates that it is possible to connect two corporate carbon management accounting approaches focusing on products and the organization into a combined carbon management accounting system. This has potential impact in making carbon management accounting in organizations leaner, and more efficient in terms of performance measurement and external communication.

This research is based on a single case study, and more case studies in different industries could highlight further practical implementation difficulties and approaches to overcome.

This paper unveils that different carbon management accounting approaches can emerge in parallel in the same corporation. The paper discusses possibilities and challenges to converge them in terms of methodology (emission factors for example) and/or in terms of information systems, on which the calculations are based.

This is, to our knowledge, the first case study of an organization explicitly acknowledging the existence of multiple emerged carbon management accounting approaches and trying to make sense of them in a convergence process to create an overarching carbon accounting system.

A management accounting perspective that underscores a quest for reducing conventionally appraised costs, negative output costs as well as heightened eco-efficiency has been used in pursuit of the study’s two main study objectives. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, the study seeks to further understanding of the relationship between product output volume, carbon costs, and CO₂ emission volume in carbon-intensive firms. Second, it identifies factors affecting climate change abatement strategies pursued by these firms. Heightening appreciation of the climate change challenge, combined with minimal CO₂ emission research undertaken from a cost management perspective, underscores the significance of the study.

A triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data collected from Slovenian firms that operate in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme has been deployed.

CO₂ polluting firms exhibit differing carbon cost structures that result from distinctive drivers of carbon consumption (product output vs capacity level). Climate change abatement strategies also differ across carbon-intensive sectors (energy, manufacturing firms transforming non-fossil carbon-based materials, and other manufacturing firms) but are relatively homogeneous within them.

From a managerial perspective, the study demonstrates that carbon efficiency improvements are generally not effective in triggering corporate CO₂ emission reduction when firms pursue a growth strategy.

Global warming signifies that CO₂ emissions constitute a social problem. The study has the potential to raise societal awareness that the causality of the manufacturing sector’s CO₂ emissions is complex. Further, the study highlights that while more efficient use of environmental resources is a prerequisite of enhanced ecological sustainability, in isolation it fails to signify improved ecological sustainability in manufacturing operations.

The paper has high originality as it reports one of the first management accounting studies to explore the distinction between combustion- and process-related CO₂ emissions. In addition, it provides distinctive support for the view that eco-efficiency is more consistent with the economic than the environmental pillar of sustainability.

This study examines how carbon tools, including carbon accounting and management tools, can be created, used, modified and linked with other traditional management controls to materialise and effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting logics in carbon management and the role of sustainability managers in these processes.

This study utilises the construct of accounting toolmaking, which refers to practices of adopting, adjusting and reconfiguring accounting tools to unfold how carbon tools are used as means to materialise responses to multiple interacting carbon management logics. It embraces a field study approach, whereby 38 sustainability managers and staff from 30 organisations in New Zealand were interviewed.

This study finds that carbon toolmaking is an important means to materialise and effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting carbon management logics. Four response strategies are identified: separation, selective coupling, combination and hybridisation. Adopting activity involves considering the additionality, detailing, localising and cascading of carbon measures and targets and their linkage to the broader carbon management programme. In adjusting carbon tools, organisations adapt the frequency and orientation of carbon reporting, intensity of carbon monitoring and breadth of carbon information sharing. Through focusing on either procedural sequencing, assimilating, equating or integrating, toolmaking reconfigures the relationship between carbon tools and traditional management control systems. Together, these three toolmaking activities can be configured differently to construct carbon tools that are fit for purpose for each response strategy. These activities also enact certain roles on sustainability managers in the process of representing, communicating and/or transferring carbon information knowledge, which also facilitate different response strategies.

The study demonstrates the various carbon toolmaking practices that allow organisations to handle the multiple interacting logics in carbon management. The findings provide suggestions for organisations on how to adopt, adjust and reconfigure carbon tools to better embed the ecological logic in organisations’ strategies and operations.

The authors identify how carbon toolmaking materialises and effectuates organisations’ responses to multiple interacting logics in carbon management.