The Reflections Upon Enterprises' Environmental Liabilities

Beginning from 1950s, as the rapid development of economy and science & technology, coupled with the world's population surge, especially the rapid increase in population of developing countries, the human being continue to increase the rate of consumption of natural resources, and thus leads to the survival of the natural resource base and the ecological environment make ends meet. With the sharp drop in the stock of natural resources and the severely damaged ecological balance, the living environment of human beings has also been a severe challenge. In the later of 1970s, population, resources, environment and development have increasingly become the four basic problems that facing human being society.Over the past 20 years, with the people's growing environmental concerns, the term'green'has also been given a special meaning, which not only penetrates into all aspects of social life, but also makes the traditional accounting theory and practice be subject to shocks. Thus, it requires both the academia and the professionals in the field of accounting fully reflect the business operations from the perspective of the situation, and provide information users of relevant information on their environmental responsibility and corporate environmental performance evaluation. In this economic context, there have been scholars combine environmental protection and accounting issues for multi-angle study, and it has already been standardized to'environmental accounting', and it also gradually becomes the emerging branch of accounting systems.Amongst the scholars'studies of many elements of environmental accounting, the study on the environmental liabilities was relatively little. In Western literatures,'environmental liability'is a unique concept, but in China, there are two different translations on legal and accounting. This is mainly due to the different disciplines and research from different perspectives, but it is not difficult to see that these two kinds of studies are unilateral. Therefore, this thesis focuses on this point, and tries to describe the links and differences of these two, and explore this issue in order to give this problem as a whole. This paper starts from the nature of environmental problems, and makes a deep analysis on the environmental problems from the aspects of philosophy, economics, law and accounting respectively. The application of the theories of philosophy and economics in particular, makes a deeper analysis on the nature and causes of environmental problems. It is not only a theoretical basis for environmental management accounting, but also the theoretical basis for the government implementation of environmental management. Then, this paper starts from the two concepts: legal responsibilities and liabilities, makes a more detailed investigation of environment legal responsibility and environmental liability. In addition to drawing on the United States'and the European Union's study on the measurement of environmental liabilities, it analyses the links and differences of environment legal responsibility and environmental liability. Then, the thesis using Beijing Cement Factory providing hazardous solid waste incineration services for other business as an example, shows that how a company should identify and measure a result of harmful solid waste as environmental liabilities, and further discuss the implementation and the establishment of environmental liability management system in our country, and while makes the reasonable prospects of China's environmental accounting. I believe that implementing, establishing and improving the environmental liability management system in our country has very important practical significance, and are worthy of vigorous promotion. The relevant research results also show that the establishment and implementation of environmental liability management system will be able to help companies better develop environmental management decision-making, and will also help the government strengthen the supervision and management of the enterprises'environment protection.