3. PRIORITIES
Development of an integrated economic,
environmental and sustainability policy, respectively
integrating environmental concerns into other policy
areas, explains the increasing demand on indicators for
measuring progress. Among EU policy initiatives is the
sixth action program, which is an EU sustainable
development strategy on a sectorial level -the Cardiff
process. The main areas that have an interest in all these
documents relate to climate change, sustainable
transport, nature and diversity, health and environment,
use of natural resources, waste management, etc. User
needs may differ slightly from one country to another
and correspond to specific national endowments. But the
main elements of the standard environmental accounts
are similar: a selection of natural resource accounts,
expenses, activities and environmental taxes, etc.
Priorities for future developments include areas like
water, waste, including the environmental chapter”
(quality of water, air, soil, ecosystems). Based on a
profound analysis of the political demand and on the
users need, the work group ESEA identified
environmental accounting modules who directly respond
to this request.
4. THE ADDED VALUE AND LIMITS OF
ACCOUNTING
Environmental accounts are tools that offers a good
cost-performance report for the following reasons:
- they enable integration and optimal use of
dispersed and incomplete primary data and also
contributes to the existing data structure,
improve coherence and serve as a basis for
evaluation;
- are integrated into the data set that correlates
environment information with economic agents;
- allow obtaining consistent sets of correlated
indicators;
- represents consequently an essential basis for
analysis and modeling concerning environment
and economy;
- guarantees international comparability of results
because of the frames, concepts and common
methods;
- play a role in the Systemic informational
environment in which accounting staff can help
guide and develop environmental information to
ensure greater consistency with economic and
social information and other uses.
There are considered different types of analysis
concerning environmental accounts. A minimum of
analytical applications is useful in the process of
compiling and disseminating imputation emissions,
through some techniques that involve inputs and outputs.
Other applications are related to decomposition analyses
and estimates on goods and services
5. LIMITATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL
ACCOUNTING
Environmental Accounting suffers from various
and serious limitations as it follows:
• There is no standard accounting method.
• Comparison between two firms or countries is
not possible if method of accounting is different
which is quite obvious.
• Input for EA is not easily available because
costs and benefits relevant to the environment
are not easily measurable.
• Many business and the Government
organizations, even the large and well managed
ones, don't adequately track the use of energy
and material or the cost of inefficient materials
use, waste management and related issue. Many
organisations, therefore, significantly
• underestimate the cost of a poor environment
performance to their organization.
• It mainly considers the cost internal to the
company and excludes cost to society.
6. STATUS QUO
Environmental work in accounting performed by
Eurostat and the Member States is quite diverse. The
working group's task is to examine the experience of
Member States and on an international level, to analyze
the definitions and classifications in force concerning
primary data in order to evaluate the availabilities and to
identify the political needs in this area.
Environmental accounts have evolved from an
incipient manner to a business organization form of
modules adapted to a developing interest in the relevant
accounts. Each module is connected with other modules
and one of the tasks of environmental management
accounts is to ensure consistency of individual modules
in order to allow information to be taken directly from
source. It is also important to use the best practices of
national accounting for their application in
environmental accounting. Activity domains of
environmental accounting are as follows:
We mention the progress in other fields, even
though the methods and the results are still in an
experimental stage and the primary data aren’t available
yet. It is about soils, ecosystems, water, waste and
specific substances accounts, including recreational and
environmental functions of forests. A development of
these modules is necessary and it must be planned
according to the political requests. Regarding this, we
present the new statistic regulation (SBS, NACE REV.
1.1 – concerning waste management statistic).