Twenty Years of Carbon Accounting and Auditing – A Review and Outlook

Maria Csutora and Gabor Harangozo
Additional contact information
Maria Csutora: Department of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

Society and Economy, 2017, vol. 39, issue 4, 459-480

Abstract: This paper aims to provide an overview of the key themes in the development of carbon accounting and auditing over the past twenty years. The evolution of the field since the Kyoto Agreement of 1997 has been divided into four stages. The need to account for and disclosure of greenhouse gas-related emissions of industrial organizations has emerged parallel to growing concerns about climate change, and international and national policy developments in the field have followed. Carbon accounting is an emerging field of business economics and covers a wide range of activities, including the measurement, calculation, monitoring, reporting and auditing of greenhouse gas emissions at organizational, process, product or supply chain levels. Various initiatives (such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or the Carbon Disclosure Project) motivate and assist industrial organizations in accounting for and reporting their achievements in the field. Different methodologies of carbon accounting (bottom-up, top-down and hybrid) enable industrial organizations to quantify their emissions; however, some trade-offs emerge when choosing among these approaches. Carbon accounting should not be an isolated task for businesses. On the contrary, there is a strong need to integrate carbon accounting issues into different functional fields in order to achieve both corporate and climate policy goals.

Keywords: business administration; business economics; carbon accounting; carbon auditing; industrial organization; sustainable development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 M14 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: The authors would like to thank the OTKA Hungarian Research Fund (116472) for providing support.
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.akademiai.com/doi/pdf/10.1556/204.2017.39.4.1 (application/pdf)
subscription

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aka:soceco:v:39:y:2017:i:4:p:459-480

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt., P. O. Box 245, H-1519 Budapest, Hungary
https://akjournals.com/

Access Statistics for this article

Society and Economy is currently edited by Szent-Iványi, Balázs

More articles in Society and Economy from Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kriston, Orsolya ().