Effects of Sustainability Accounting in Today’s World

This study proposes that there is a correlation between sustainable reporting or accounting and the success of the corporation in the contemporary world. Investigating the issue of effects of sustainability accounting/reporting remains practically motivating since it is importance to accountants, regulators, managers and general public.

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 1
EFFECTS OF SUSTAINABILITY ACCOUNTING IN TODAY’S WORLD
By (Student’s Name)
Professor’s Name
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Date

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 2
Effects of Sustainability Accounting in Today’s World
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Practical Motivation.........................................................................................................................3
Theoretical Motivation....................................................................................................................3
Literature Review............................................................................................................................4
Hypothesis.......................................................................................................................................6
Research Method.............................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................8
Appendix: Summary of Five Journals...........................................................................................12

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 3
Introduction
The main issue discussed in this proposal is the effects of sustainable accounting in
todays’ worlds. This study proposes that there is a correlation between sustainable reporting or
accounting and the success of the corporation in the contemporary world (Ceulemans, Lozano
and Alonso-Almeida 2015). The CSR and TBL reporting are general terms synonymous with
sustainably reporting (Epstein 2018. It is argued that sustainability reporting is important in the
contemporary business success because it helps address stakeholders beyond targeted by the IR
(financial providers) (Ioannou and Serafeim 2017).
Practical Motivation
Investigating the issue of effects of sustainability accounting/reporting remains
practically motivating since it is importance to accountants, regulators, managers and general
public. To the general public, such as investors, sustainability reporting avails important
information which help them make informed decisions on which firms to choose for investment
while the public will also benefit from such practices since they will know which firms consider
their public interest in operations. Regulators will benefit because they will be able to know
which firms are in compliance or not to help take the necessary actions while accountants will
benefit from using a combined GRI and IIRC recommendation which helps them paint a true
picture of the company to create a sustained competitive advantage. Managers will greatly
benefit from increased corporate growth when customers increase due to reputational increase as
the firm is viewed as a sustainable one (Schaltegger and Burritt 2017).
Theoretical Motivation

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 4
The study on the ‘effects of sustainability accounting/reporting on contemporary world,”
especially in respect to the increase in corporate growth will greatly contribute to the existing
theory by replicating the current research, testing theory and addressing gaps on the issue.
Specifically, it will help replicate the current research which have found a positive linkage
between sustainability reporting and increased corporate performance and productivity and hence
corporate growth. It will also address the literature gap of the few studies that have specifically
been focused on probing the connection between SR and corporate growth. It will also test
theory about how the implication of both GRI and IIRC standards have any positive linkage with
increased corporate growth (Makarenko and Plastun 2017).
Literature Review
Sustainability reporting positively affects the success of the contemporary business
through four main benefits to the organization including being a valuable risk management tool;
help in generating savings; help in better decision-making and help in increasing trust with
stakeholders. The value of sustainability accounting or reporting is that it guarantees the
considerations of the impacts of an organization on sustainability issues and allow such a firm to
remain transparent regarding the opportunities and the risks they encounter. Organizations must
provide tangible, credible demonstrations of the level of its sustainability through adherence to
proper sustainability reporting guidelines (Williams, Wilmshurst and Clift 2010). A corporation
builds desired trusts amongst its clientele and all the key stakeholders hence impacting the
bottom lines. In accordance with the business axiom-one cannot manage what he cannot
measure, transparence remains the currency which builds trust which subsequently build the
business. Sustainability reporting have four fundamental benefits to the contemporary

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 5
organization including being a useful in risk management, helping in savings generation, helping
in better decision-making as well as helping in increasing stakeholders trust (Sorina-Geanina,
Adriana, and Ana-Maria 2018).
Sustainability reporting or accounting is a tool for better organizational risk management.
Some have held that sustainability reporting and organizational risk management are essentially
“2 sides of same coin.” It is noteworthy to consider sustainability and risk together since in grand
strategic terms, sustainability involves realization of the resilience of the business, and a chance
or opportunity for transparency and partnership enhancements (Peršić, Janković and Krivačić
2017).. Sustainability dictates and shapes the business resiliency and efficiency in the
contemporary world. Simply put, both ERM (enterprise risk management) and sustainability
accounting or reporting are functions fundamentally focused on the risk identification and
prioritization, with preeminence on external disclosure, internal reporting, as well as
transparency (Schaltegger, Burritt and Petersen 2017). Management of such risks essentially
calls for making desired investment decisions presently for a lasting capacity building as well as
developing adaptive mechanisms and strategies; which are only possible through better
sustainability accounting and reporting (Pius, Raymond and Oraka 2013).
Sustainability reporting enhances organizational operational efficiency. Several years in
the past, it was believed that a mutual exclusive relationship exist between sustainability and
profits (Gibassier and Alcouffe 2018). Such a conventional wisdom has since been reversed,
with corporations realizing substantial cost-savings via environmental, economically and
socially-linked operational efficiencies (Schaltegger 2017). Investors are also increasing linking
better financial performance of a company with better environmental, social and governance
factors (ESG) performance (Lozano, Nummert and Ceulemans 2016). This survey was dubbed

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 6
“Green Winners.” Therefore, today, most corporations creating value via sustainability, initially
examine at the improvement of returns on capital that usually implies reduction of operating
costs via enhanced natural-resource management (like energy use & waste) (Charles Jr,
Schmidheiny and Watts 2017).
Strengths and Limitation: The prevailing literature has demonstrated a positive link
between sustainability accounting or reporting and the performance of the today’s organizations.
The literature reviewed has shown that that sustainable environmental accounting has substantial
influence on the productivity of corporate to improve the growth (Hernádi 2019). The limitation
in the literature, however, is that there is extremely few studies that have focused on
investigating the association between SR and the increase in cotemporary corporate productivity
and performance to improve the corporate growth (Saeidi et al. 2015). This gap in the literature,
however, calls for a special study specifically focusing on probing this relationship to ensure
corporate growth (Welford 2016).
Hypothesis
1. HO: There is no correlation between sustainable reporting/accounting and increase in the
contemporary corporate productivity to enhance the corporate growth
2. HO: There is no correlation between sustainable accounting/reporting and economic
performance of a corporate business.
Research Method

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 7
The methodology adopted for this study is systematic review of literature which will help
reveal trends, inconsistencies, relations and gaps in literature to organize and appraise the current
work in sustainability accounting and reporting field. The approach suggested by Fink (2010)
will be used to delineate fundamental terminology to create the understanding of methodological
concepts (Rudiger 2013). The second step will be to use practical screening criteria to exclude
and include articles from review. Third step will involve developing and applying
methodological screening criteria to analyze the content of the study and the fourth step (final),
the researcher will synthesize and assess the findings.
The research aims at responding to the question of what are the general relations and
trends and which inconsistencies and consistencies in findings are identifiable and researcher
will search for any major study gap. Following the review of literature, the researcher expect to
find that a considerable share of articles emphasized on effects of sustainability accounting on
the corporate productivity and performance and hence corporate growth. The researcher will
subsequently inductively refine the aim to acknowledge what effects are inspected in literature
and further search for inconsistencies, consistencies, and gaps (Minimol and Makesh 2013).
The researcher will select Web of Knowledge database due to elaborate coverage of peer-
reviewed articles from accounting, business and management (Schaltegger and Wagner 2017).
This data base includes every journal with the impact factor that is purportedly the utmost
significant outlets in this field. The researcher will achieve a wider journal coverage by
complementing the search via additional use of ScienceDirect database that covers many more
journals on accounting, management and business.
The application of screening criteria will then follow setting the period between 2010 and
2019. The beginning year is chosen because of triggering influence of introduction of guidelines

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 8
of GRI because it is perceived as the most significant driver which influence the sustainability
reporting growth (Domingues et al. 2017). The search will be restricted to papers solely printed
in English and we will accept conceptual, empirical besides theoretical publications. Books
reviews, comments and editorial notes will be excluded. We will conduct the search and expect
to have an overall body of two-hundred and sixty-five peer-reviewed journals and screen each
journal to assess whether or not the content will be essential relevant in respect of sustainability
reporting. We aim at increasing the research reliability by checking individual papers by both
researchers and expect this process to result in (n=178) papers of necessary relevance engaged in
subsequent review.
We will apply methodological screening criteria that will help us consider a review as
content analysis to quantitatively and qualitatively assess descriptive aspects and evaluate
content criteria respectively. The Mayring (2010) generic process model with four content
analytical steps (material collection, descriptive analysis, category selection and material
evaluation) will be used. The findings of the systematic literature review process following Fink
(2010) will the carried out and presented in following chapters.
References

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 9
Ceulemans, K., Lozano, R. and Alonso-Almeida, M., 2015. Sustainability reporting in higher
education: Interconnecting the reporting process and organizational change management for
sustainability. Sustainability, 7(7), pp.8881-8903.
Charles Jr, O.H., Schmidheiny, S. and Watts, P., 2017. Walking the talk: The business case for
sustainable development. Routledge.
Domingues, A.R., Lozano, R., Ceulemans, K. and Ramos, T.B., 2017. Sustainability reporting in
public sector organisations: Exploring the relation between the reporting process and
organisational change management for sustainability. Journal of environmental
management, 192, pp.292-301. http://iranarze.ir/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/8630-English-
IranArze.pdf
Epstein, M.J., 2018. Making sustainability work: Best practices in managing and measuring
corporate social, environmental and economic impacts. Routledge.
Gibassier, D. and Alcouffe, S., 2018. Environmental management accounting: the missing link to
sustainability?.
Hernádi, B.H., 2019. Green Accounting for Corporate Sustainability.
file:///C:/Users/noahh/Downloads/TMP_2012_02_04_Hodi_Hernadi.pdf
Ioannou, I. and Serafeim, G., 2017. The consequences of mandatory corporate sustainability
reporting. Harvard Business School research working paper, (11-100).
Lozano, R., Nummert, B. and Ceulemans, K., 2016. Elucidating the relationship between
sustainability reporting and organisational change management for sustainability. Journal of
cleaner production, 125, pp.168-188.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298807527_Elucidating_the_relationship_between_Su
stainability_Reporting_and_Organisational_Change_Management_for_Sustainability

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 10
Makarenko, I. and Plastun, A., 2017. The role of accounting in sustainable
development. Accounting and Financial Control, 1(2), pp.4-12.
https://businessperspectives.org/images/pdf/applications/publishing/templates/article/assets/
9472/AFC_2017_02_Makarenko.pdf
Minimol, M.C. and Makesh, K.G., 2013. Green accounting and reporting practices among indian
Corporates”. Asia pacific journal of research, 1. http://apjor.com/files/1392563546.pdf
Peršić, M., Janković, S. and Krivačić, D., 2017. Sustainability Accounting: Upgrading Corporate
Social Responsibility. In The Dynamics of Corporate Social Responsibility (pp. 285-303).
Springer, Cham.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311944129_Sustainability_Accounting_Upgrading_Co
rporate_Social_Responsibility/link/5aa161d6aca272d448b36dc6/download
Pius, V. C. O., Raymond, A. E and Oraka, A., O., 2013. An Appraisal of Sustainability
Environmental Accounting in Enhancing Corporate Productivity and Economic Performance.
International Journal of Advanced Research, 1(8), pp.685-693.
file:///C:/Users/noahh/Downloads/Arrticleonsusenv.withpvc.pdf
Rudiger, H., 2013. Determinants of sustainability reporting: A review of results, trends, and
opportunities in an expanding field of research. Journal of Cleaner Production, pp. 1-53.
file:///C:/Users/noahh/Downloads/HahnKhnen2013-Determinantsofsustainabilityreporting-
Literaturereview-SSRN.pdf
Saeidi, S.P., Sofian, S., Saeidi, P., Saeidi, S.P. and Saaeidi, S.A., 2015. How does corporate
social responsibility contribute to firm financial performance? The mediating role of competitive
advantage, reputation, and customer satisfaction. Journal of business research, 68(2), pp.341-
350.

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 11
Schaltegger, S. and Burritt, R., 2017. Contemporary environmental accounting: issues, concepts
and practice. Routledge.
Schaltegger, S. and Wagner, M., 2017. Managing the business case for sustainability: The
integration of social, environmental and economic performance. Routledge.
Schaltegger, S., 2017. Sustainability as a fundamental challenge for management accountants.
In The Role of the Management Accountant (pp. 274-291). Routledge.
Schaltegger, S., Burritt, R. and Petersen, H., 2017. An introduction to corporate environmental
management: Striving for sustainability. Routledge.
Sorina-Geanina, S.T.Ă.N.E.S.C.U., Adriana, P.H. And Ana-Maria, C.A., 2018. The Role Of The
Accounting Profession In Achieving The Objectives Of Sustainable Development. Annals
of'Constantin Brancusi'University of Targu-Jiu. Economy Series, (3).
file:///C:/Users/noahh/Downloads/16_Stanescu_AnnalsofConstantinBrancusi_TarguJiu.pdf
Welford, R., 2016. Corporate environmental management 1: systems and strategies. Routledge.
Williams, B., Wilmshurst, T. and Clift, R., 2010. The role of accountants in sustainability
reporting-a local government study. In Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting
Conference (APIRA) (pp. 1-18).

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 12
Appendix: Summary of Five Journals
Author Date Title Journal Paper
Type-
empirical
or
theoretical
If
empirical,
dependent
&
independen
t variable
Summary of
contribution
Minimol,
M.C. and
Makesh,
K.G.,
201
3
Green
accounting
and reporting
practices
among Indian
Corporates
Asia pacific
journal of
research
Theoretica
l
N/A This study
critically
reviewed
challenges of
implementing
sustainability
accounting in
firms and
opportunities
for
accomplishin
g extra
benefits,
rather than
just
compliance

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 13
with
regulation.
The relevance
of this study
is that the
current
proposal also
probes the
effects of
sustainability
accounting in
contemporary
world,
measured by
organizationa
l productivity
and
performance
and the
corporate
growth at
large. Thus,
this article

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 14
will be used
demonstrate
the effects of
sustainability
accounting by
citing the
results of this
study on
benefits of
sustainability
accounting to
organizations.
Rudiger,
H.,
201
3
Determinants
of
sustainability
reporting: A
review of
results,
trends, and
opportunities
in an
expanding
field of
Journal of
Cleaner
Production
Theoretica
l
N/A This study
investigated
that
determinants
of
sustainability
reporting by
reviewing
results,
opportunities
and trends in

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 15
research expanding
sustainability
reporting.
The info from
this study is
relevance to
this proposal
because it
also seeks to
understand
the effects of
sustainability
reporting to
recommend
the best ways
highlighted
by the
opportunities
for expansion
by which
accountants
can best
under

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 16
sustainability
reporting.
Pius, V. C.
O.,,
Raymond,
A. E and
Oraka,
A.,O.,
201
3
An Appraisal
Of
Sustainability
Environmenta
l Accounting
In Enhancing
Corporate
Productivity
And
Economic
Performance.
International
Journal of
Advanced
Research
Theoretica
l
N/A This paper
appraised the
sustainability
environmenta
l accounting
in economic
performance
and corporate
productivity.
This study is
relevant to
the current
study since it
will also
investigate
the effects of
sustainability
accounting on
corporate
performance
and

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 17
productivity
and corporate
growth
Domingues
, A.R.,
Lozano, R.,
Ceulemans
, K. and
Ramos,
T.B.,
201
7
Sustainability
reporting in
public sector
organizations:
Exploring the
relation
between the
reporting
process and
organizational
change
management
for
sustainability.
Journal of
environment
al
management,
Theoretica
l
N/A This study
explored the
relationship
between
reporting
process and
the
organizationa
l
sustainability
change
management.
The relevance
of this study
to the current
proposal is
that they are
covering
same issues
which will

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 18
ensure that
corporates
greatly
benefit from
implementing
sustainability
reporting
Lozano, R.,
Nummert,
B. and
Ceulemans
, K.
201
6
Elucidating
the
relationship
between
sustainability
reporting and
organizational
change
management
for
sustainability
Journal of
cleaner
production,
Theoretica
l
N/A This study
aimed at
elucidating
the
interrelations
between
sustainability
reporting and
the
organization
change
management
in
organizations
to expand the
limited

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 19
research on
this linkage.
Understandin
g such
association is
relevant to
the present
study to show
that
sustainability
reporting and
organizationa
l change
management
for
sustainability
since SR
gives the
basis for
planning
change in
organization.

Effects Of Sustainability Accounting In Today’s World 20