The Effects of Climate Change Policy on the Business Community: A Corporate Environmental Accounting Perspective

This paper proposes a normative framework to explain the influence of climate change policy on corporate environmental strategies, and at the same time describes how these strategies could be translated into an integrated environmental accounting model based on formal accounting statements. In particular, it aims to demonstrate a new approach of climate change accounting in order to overcome some important weaknesses of previous environmental accounting methods, such as accuracy and reliability. Currently, the majority of existing accounting methods record information on climate change on a voluntary basis. Even though they may assist businesses in designing essential environmental strategies and help public policy entities improve their knowledge on the results of such strategies, the informal nature of the accounting standards and the variable type of financial and non-financial information make the use of such models untrustworthy and complicated. Finally, an empirical example of this framework is also presented. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.