Climate Change Accounting and Reporting: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

During the last few years, sustainability has become an increasingly important dimension for corporations. Many stakeholders expect companies to implement sustainability-oriented practices and report on these actions and their results. As a consequence, corporate accountability and, more specifically, corporate accounting and reporting, should focus not only on financial, social, and environmental performance, but also on sustainability-related aspects. Among these aspects, climate change is becoming increasingly important for companies, which must take action to counter the effects of their activities on climate change and inform their stakeholders about these actions and their effects. Given the initial state of research about climate change accounting and reporting, the authors focused on the sustainable development goal (SDG) no. 13, “climate action”, in order to highlight the current state and the future directions of this area of inquiry. They used a mixed approach to perform a systematic literature review about sustainability accounting/reporting and climate change: (1) a qualitative analysis according to a qualitative analytical framework, and (2) a bibliometric (descriptive statistical) approach. The authors found that: (1) the main perspectives addressed in the selected articles relate to sustainability accounting and reporting in a broad sense; (2) there was a lack of contributions about management of climate change-related aspects, with specific reference to strategic and operational planning, accounting, and control of the actions implemented by the management of firms to counter climate change problems. The authors suggested the topics accounting scholars should focus their future research upon and underscored the social responsibilities of accounting scholars to increasingly integrate climate change mitigation into their accounting foci. They reviewed the main areas of climate change accounting/reporting literature and identified the gaps to be filled.