Linking Environmental Management Accounting: A Reflection on (Missing) Links to Sustainability and Planetary Boundaries

ABSTRACT

Environmental management accounting (EMA) is an innovative management accounting approach that covers a large range of tools with the purpose to support different actors in environmentally beneficial decision-making in companies. While the existing literature has been systematised and many EMA tools and case study applications have been discussed in depth, the links to sustainability are mostly rather assumed than explicitly discussed. This article addresses links and missing links between EMA and ecological aspects of sustainability. As its name reveals, EMA focuses on issues of the natural environment. It would thus be inappropriate to harshly criticise missing explicit links to social issues and other non-environmental aspects of sustainability (e.g. as proposed by the UN sustainable development goals). The question, however, remains whether and how exactly EMA links or could be linked to global ecological issues of sustainability. This paper therefore examines EMA links to global environmental issues based on the concept of planetary boundaries as it covers key ecological issues of global sustainability.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Philip Beske-Janssen and Samanthi Silva for commenting an earlier version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [Grant Number project number 01UT1422B].