Environmental Costs and Environmental Information Disclosure in the Accounting Systems

Abstract

Nowadays, the effects of human societies have increased on environment due to technological and industrial development. So environment variations could affect human beings like other animal species. Given the importance of environmental costs, one can consider them as a parts of final cost of products or services in business units , so failure to report these costs in financial statements cause to firstly that environmental costs remain hidden and unknown to the management and necessary actions to control them fail to do , and secondly that failure to report environmental costs as a parts of final cost would undermine the most important qualitative characteristic of accounting information namely their reliability. This environmental accounting facilitates environmental costs management and reducing costs through making the relationships between costs and their underlying activities. Researches in recent years led to the criticism about the framework of traditional financial reporting and its ability to provide a complete list of company activities and its accountability. Social and environmental reporting is a tool to account companies against their performance. The reports should provide impartial information which allows beneficiaries to provide a reliable estimation of their social and environmental performance.