Accounting Research On Corporate Carbon Emissions

As environmental issues become more important, the idea of low-carbon economy is very popular now. That raises a need to build an accounting system for those activities. In the beginning of the21century, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued several drafts and programs on the carbon emissions. But they were abandoned for some reasons. This paper has a comprehensive consideration of the characteristics of the carbon and the principles of accounting, and compares them to debate on whether carbon emission rights should be recognized as assets, which kind they will be recognized as and how to measure them. The drafts issued by IASB or FASB caused a big problem which was that, as time goes by, the change caused by the assets and liabilities did not match. This paper pays lots of attention to this problem, discusses the recognition and measurement of the liabilities related to the carbon emissions. At last, this paper listed the accounting treatments according to kinds of situations.