Environmental Accounting and Corporate Sustainability: A Research Synthesis

Abstract

The paper examined the extent of environmental accounting and its relationship with corporate sustainability with an ardent focus on controversies, contradictions, gaps and relationships with previous explorations. The researchers adopted an assiduous literature review approach on the diverse perspectives of investigators and scholars through probing into their conceptualizations, empiricism and theoretical underpinnings of industrialized nations, emerging economies and least developed countries. The analysis provides a comprehensive overview of recent studies on multiple dimensions of environmental accounting and their interrelationship with corporate sustainability. We observed that there was a broad gap on the issue of profitability, financial leverage, industry type and social and moral responsibility of environmental accounting. Additionally, we also discovered that the relationship between environmental accounting and corporate sustainability has not been effectively established in emerging economies. Premised on this intriguing findings, it was recommended that standard setters should yield to the incessant calls and proposals canvassed by renowned scholars for directives bordering on the establishment of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on environmental accounting (EA) in order to enhance corporate sustainability (CS).