1.2 Relevance of accounting and capital budgeting to environmental management and engineering design issues
Accounting systems inform and motivate behavior, thus any information included therein has the potential to influence behavior. Including environmental information in accounting systems is a prerequisite to linking sound environmental management and the principles of sustainable development with everyday business and personal decisions.
Historically, the environmental effects of doing business have been excluded from financial information systems unless they directly affect the entity's profitability or future - for example fines or accidents. Environmental effects, which are not regulated or scrutinized by the government, are often ignored because they may be considered to be:
Unimportant (for example, there appear to be unlimited resources)
Not pertinent to the core business function or the bottom line
Part of the price of progress
Difficult to estimate and to assign financial values
More recently, there has been a shift by corporations and governments towards viewing the environment as a perishable resource which needs to be managed for prolonged use - be that use commercial or social. There has also been a realization that damaging the environmental is costly - to individuals, corporations, and society. These costs need to be avoided. Managing and avoiding environmental costs requires recognizing that these costs exist, ensuring that these costs are recognized by the parties responsible for the costs, and providing incentives to reduce these costs.
Most environmental effects are the result of design and engineering decisions. For example, a product which contains toxic materials has the potential to have a high environmental cost. However, these environmental costs may not have been apparent to the product designer.
Manufacturing processes which generate large amounts of waste will result in high disposal costs, in addition to the costs of inefficient resource utilization and the costs associated with handling and managing materials which do not ultimately become marketable product. The process engineer may be aware of the waste handling costs, but is unlike to fully realize additional costs associated with waste.
While many decision makers are not environmental experts, all are probably familiar with financial systems of some form or another and most face cost constraints. The consumer in the supermarket has a finite amount to spend, the manager has spending limits. The aim of full cost accounting is to encapsulate environmental effects within the financial measures used to make decisions.
1.3 Types of accounting systems
There are three main types of accounting systems - each with a different purpose and involving data gathering at different levels of aggregation:
National Accounting Systems :
National accounts are national income and production accounts, such as the Gross National .Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product本文来自优.文,论-文·网原文请找腾讯3249-114 (GDP) which aim to measure and track an economy's contribution to the well-being of its inhabitants. National income accounts show the national demand or goods and services and are used to track and measure economic growth. Conventional economic thinking has assumed that the increases in goods and services produced domestically (GDP) and national income(GNP) are adequate yardsticks of economic health. For example, the World Bank uses per capita GNP as a major criterion for classifying national economies.
Financial Accounting Systems:
Financial accounts, such as balance sheets and income statements are used to keep track of business incomes and outflows. These financial reports are for use by persons outside the firm - for example, lenders or investors. There are relevant to the enterprise as a whole and are generally subject to strict government rules.
the most common financial accounting reports are for external use by are the financial statements in a firm's annual report to shareholders. In the United States and most developed countries, these reports conform to generally accepted accounting principles developed predominantly by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The overall objectives of a firm's financial accounting statements are: (Stickney et al, 1991):
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