Environmental Accounting as a Cornerstone of Corporate Sustainability Reporting

The major objective of this paper is to stress a role of environmental accounting in developing management’s strategic initiatives in the field of environmental protection. The socially responsible behavior of a company implies undertaking various activities for prevention, removal and minimizing the harmful effects on the environment. Such a responsible strategic approach ultimately leads to numerous cost savings, improvement in profitability and reputation and finally enables corporate sustainable development. In order to achieve its goal, this research will be methodologically based on the qualitative approach of published articles' content analysis and the analysis of corporate practice in designing environmental accounting systems that allow better identification and control of costs and benefits related to environmental protection activities. Analysis of different accounting practices in producing financial and nonfinancial environmental information requires distinction between environmental financial and management accounting, given the fact that they create different types of information intended for internal and external users. Management needs such information for the purposes of identification and control of environmental protection costs, making decisions about the more efficient use of resources, projecting costs and benefits of further activities and attempts to increase company's value through a socially responsible behavior. The expected results of this research should confirm the premise that increased awareness of the need of environmental protection and achieving sustainable development motivates companies for more frequently producing obligatory and voluntary external and internal reports about their environmental activities. At the same time, environmental accounting is supporting these initiatives, but we expect that in future new tools will be developed that will improve the quality and scope of its informational offer, which may be the area of potential for further research