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This chapter argues the policy challenge of environmental management accounting is getting decision-makers to understand they are dealing with a mess: a situation where disagreement and uncertainty exists. Finding shape and structure in messy situations is a pre-condition to designing and implementing effective policy. Visualising communication processes between policy makers and takers, and the content transmitted between them, supports the search for shape and structure. A series of images on process and content aspects of environmental management accounting are presented. Five images place secondary data into theoretical constructs of classical diffusion theory. Collectively, the images on communication processes and their consequences show that relying on top-down innovation through mass media distribution of advisories is ineffective in achieving widespread pro-environmental behaviour. Two images are then presented in a search to place environmental management accounting within a mapping on the causes and effects of management accounting. A tenuous link with research on how environmental uncertainty affects accounting policy choice is identified. But mainstream accounting and management conventions with respect to environmental uncertainty typically focus on environmental matters that exclude nature. Hence process and content images on environmental management accounting presented here illustrate the disagreement and uncertainty characteristics of a mess. Forming and implementing effective policy is not possible in a messy situation.

Environmental management accounting (EMA) is concerned about the accounting needs of managers in relation to corporate activities that affect the environment as well as environment-related impacts on the organization. This paper provides an overview of a range of challenges faced by EMA.

This paper provides an overview of current trends, state of the art and best-practice in environmental cost accounting as well as a discussion of how it complements environmental performance and eco-efficiency indicators. It addresses a number of current approaches to ECA. Amongst others, these will refer to the evolution of and experiences with ECA in companies, such as activity-based costing, process costing and target costing. The trend in cost accounting towards relating costs to material flows and related environmental impacts calls for indicators of integrated economic and environmental performance measurement, so-called eco-efficiency performance measurement.

The complementarity of ECA with environmental performance indicators (in particular eco-efficiency indicators) and environmental performance measurement also needs to take into account the integration of ECA and performance measurement into controlling and operations. Therefore, the paper will also discuss how ECA and environmental performance indicators can be integrated into decision-making. The paper and performance measurement approaches for decision-making under different firm-level operating conditions.

Three dimensions of physically based environmental accounting are indicated — regional, company and product accounting — these have developed along different paths. In the globalised and highly specialised economy of today, company activities and their services are multinational and are to a decreasing degree to be seen as a subset of regions. Consequently, these accounting practices intersect each other, on three dimensions, from micro to macro levels. Even though they are all based on physical and energy input/output (I/O) analysis the differences in terminology, structure and evaluation methods make it difficult to exchange data and use them efficiently. This paper explores several aspects of these three environmental accounting dimensions such as the control engineering tradition, the lack of adequate data and the resource consuming work as well as incompatibility, overlapping scopes and aims. The conclusion is that the three accounting dimensions are similar in construction in spite of a development in independent paths. The differences are not primarily the three-letter acronyms of the tools but the objectives and control scope used in studies. If adopting a common framework and a global all-dimensional nomenmore sustainable.

This chapter argues the policy challenge of environmental management accounting is getting decision-makers to understand they are dealing with a mess: a situation where disagreement and uncertainty exists. Finding shape and structure in messy situations is a pre-condition to designing and implementing effective policy. Visualising communication processes between policy makers and takers, and the content transmitted between them, supports the search for shape and structure. A series of images on process and content aspects of environmental management accounting are presented. Five images place secondary data into theoretical constructs of classical diffusion theory. Collectively, the images on communication processes and their consequences show that relying on top-down innovation through mass media distribution of advisories is ineffective in achieving widespread pro-environmental behaviour. Two images are then presented in a search to place environmental management accounting within a mapping on the causes and effects of management accounting. A tenuous link with research on how environmental uncertainty affects accounting policy choice is identified. But mainstream accounting and management conventions with respect to environmental uncertainty typically focus on environmental matters that exclude nature. Hence process and content images on environmental management accounting presented here illustrate the disagreement and uncertainty characteristics of a mess. Forming and implementing effective policy is not possible in a messy situation.

This article analyses and discusses whether there is an association between environmental performance and corporate environmental reporting in the paper and electricity industries in Germany and the United Kingdom and what the influence of environmental management accounting is on this link. After discussing environmental performance measurement and environmental reporting in general, the chapter introduces a measurement framework for both as the basis of an empirical study. Subsequently, the major empirical findings from a cross-sectional survey of corporate environmental reports and environmental statements as well as environmental performance indicators for air and water emissions in the above industries and countries are reported. These findings suggest that consistency between environmental performance and environmental reporting (operationalised empirically in terms of statistical correlation) is relatively rare, although (as is argued in the article) future credibility of companies will most likely depend on it. The findings also reveal that environmental performance tend to be linked to country location whereas quality of corporate environmental reports tend to be associated to sector membership. The chapter attempts an explanation of this, relating the findings to differences in environmental legislation in both countries. It concludes with implications for the use of environmental reports by third parties as well as a number of recommendations, especially concerning the need for more standardised indicators and reporting procedures.

Frameworks for environmental management accounting refer to a number of tools that assist managers to address the environmental effects of their businesses. One area that has not received systematic attention is the link between environmental management accounting information and risk (and environmental risk) management. As a step in this direction the paper, first, reviews risk management and environmental risk management while developing five research questions related to disclosure of information by Australian Commonwealth public sector entities; second, details the research method and sample of public sector entities examined for the four-year period 1999–2002; third, considers the empirical results. These show an increasing level of disclosure and greater disclosure by non-budget entities. The paper draws conclusions and discusses possible future research opportunities in the context of links between environmental management accounting and environmental risk management.

In the past 25 years various information instruments for environmental management have been developed. Some of them focus on the production process and hence can be called “process oriented”. The most important process-oriented instruments are corporate input-output balance, Environmental Performance Indicators and methods of flow cost accounting. They are described and compared in this paper. Benefits for the use of the different instruments are shown. For a continuous use of Environmental Accounting Instruments in day-to-day environmental management, these instruments need to be supported with modern information technologies. This paper shows IT strategies on how to integrate Environmental Accounting functionalities into a Business Information System, which are discussed and partly supported by results from two surveys. The benefit of a structured approach to develop and integrate Environmental Accounting functionalities into a Business Information System is shown. A process model for the IT implementation of Environmental Accounting instruments taking into account the integration into existing business software is presented based on the prototype model. The nine phases of the model are described and discussed. A case study at the glass manufacturing company SCHOTT Glas shows how Environmental Performance Indicator Systems can be implemented in SAP R/3 and in ERP Systems in general. The findings presented here are results from the research project INTUS.

Environmental management is an increasingly important part of strategic management in companies, and the significance of environmental issues is increasing in business worldwide as companies form large global networks. The environmental pollution caused by industrial countries — especially air emissions — is a topic of global concern, but environmental debates often focus on finding the guilty companies instead of suggesting schemes for preventing environmental harm. Companies and administrators should aim to develop their environmental decision-making; to this end, the environmental modelling system and its applications presented in this article have been designed to identify, analyse, manage and report environmental factors in relation to operational and financial functions in business processes. The model addresses the process, environmental and financial aspects of operations on the basis of process management, environmental management and environmental business accounting. The model can also be used to determine alternatives for cost-effectively improving environmental performance. The environmental modelling system enables a company to:

As a result of increased corporate environmental costs since the 1970s and steadily rising costs and innovation pressure in globalised competition, corporate environ-mental cost accounting (ECA) is continuously under attention. Cost management decisions — and ensuing entrepreneurial decisions — will increasingly depend on successful acquisition and transfer of information and data that consider ecological as well as economic effects. Sustainable future-oriented corporate governance will not function without an ECA to support the planning, management and control of the company.

Within the framework of the project Integration of ECA into environmental management systems in SME’s sponsored by the German Federal Foundation for the Environment (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt — DBU), Osnabrück, ECA was successfully implemented in more than ten companies. The project was carried out in co-operation between the Institut für Ökologische Betriebwirtschaft (IöB), Siegen, and the Internationales Hochschulinstitut (IHI), Zittau, both Germany. The objective of this project was to show economic and ecological advantages of, but also barriers to, ECA implementation by examples of German companies on the one hand and Czech and Polish ones on the other. The selection criteria as regards the companies were on one hand the size of the enterprise and on the other the willingness of management to implement an ECA. The project was especially focused on the operational use in SMEs and represents a further development of existing flow cost accounting systems (see e.g. Burritt and The following describes the implementation methodology developed in the project and illustrates how this Schaltegger, 2000).

The following describes the implementation methodology developed in the project and illustrates how this method was applied in one of the companies which participated in the study.