Accounting and Accountability Tools and Practices for Environmental Issues: A Narrative Historical Academic Debate

This chapter deals with the growing relevance of selected non-financial reporting issues in the context of accountability. In the last 30 years, more than before, new threats have emerged as a result of non-sustainable conducted world. To this respect, using the lenses of sustainable development, I reviewed, adopting a narrative historical approach, the debate arose among academics around new accountability issues with a specific focus on environmental issues. I divided this chronological overview into four periods: the early 90s, 90s–2000s, 10s to date, and the contemporary debate. The aim is to outline not only how the information needs have changed overtime. Rather, this is an attempt to clarify how we are not running so fast as the global emergency to better account for sustainability is requiring. The main reason lies on the dogged intentions to standardize and/or harmonize procedures to do so. Standards, as the case of accounting standards, work efficiently only when they are enforced by recognized supranational organisms and endorsed by States thanks to common shared policies and laws. On the social and environmental sides, the failure of Sustainable Millennium Goals and the new challenge represented by the Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) demonstrate that we are still so far from this agreement. Hence, the best contribution we can give to society is proposing new solutions and maintaining/renewing them overtime when they work correctly.