The Environmental Management Accounting Practices for Sustainable Ecological Performance in South African Commercial Real Estate

Abstract

The commercial real estate (CRE)’s slow progress in adopting green practices suggests the need to strengthen sustainable environmental accountability efforts. The green practices can be strengthened and complemented by incorporating environmental management accounting (EMA) practices into business strategic planning to achieve sustained ecological and business performance in South Africa’s CRE. A systematic literature review of 75 journal articles provides insights into EMA practices and green practices in the CRE sector. The findings suggest that implementing EMAPs, such as applying energy accounting, carbon management accounting, life-cycle costing, and the sustainability balanced scoreboard, is responsible for improving environmental sustainability performance. EMA’s role in promoting sustainable performance in the CRE sector involves potential cost savings, reduced energy usage, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and enhanced efficiency. Moreover, EMA addresses environmental issues in product pricing and formulating environmentally sensitive decisions that simultaneously address sustainable performance challenges. Therefore, the study’s findings pave the way for stakeholders in the CRE sector to work toward a coherent green practices framework. The study presents the South African context and can be generalized across other developing African countries in the Global South. Calls for future research highlight the challenges of implementing EMA in the CRE sector of developing countries.