A STUDY ON GREEN ACCOUNTING AND IMPLEMENTATION EXAMPLES

Abstract

In recent years, when we are more exposed to the negative effects of climate change and the conscious or unconscious activities of human beings on nature, businesses have started to see nature as a stakeholder within the framework of their social responsibility understanding. It is seen that business administrations, which draw attention to environmental problems in particular, are closely interested in issues such as supporting nature protection activities, energy production/consumption, amount of carbon dioxide released or soil/water/air pollution through regulations or restrictions. On the other hand, businesses incur some preventive, reducing and restorative environmental additional costs that arise for the purposes of protecting or using the nature in which they operate. The emerging green accounting practices at this point are based on the necessity of businesses to internalize environmental costs. In other words, green accounting, or environmental accounting, is a type of accounting that tries to integrate environmental costs with the normal production costs of enterprises into the financial results of their activities. Thus, with green accounting practices, it is possible to determine the resource use of enterprises and the costs incurred on the ecosystem. In this context, the study aims to explain what environmental costs are, how these costs should be included in the current accounting system and how they should be accounted for, by examining the current literature on green accounting. Even if the environmental activities of the enterprises are recorded, the information users cannot understand what these activities are from the financial statements produced in the current accounting system. Therefore, in the study, after explaining how environmental costs are accounted in the current accounting system, suggestions have been made to make environmental activities visible to all stakeholders. Thus, businesses will have fulfilled the requirement of the concept of social responsibility, which is one of the basic concepts of accounting. It is anticipated that the study will contribute to the existing literature in terms of identifying and accounting for environmental costs and also raising awareness about being more sensitive to the environment.