A Study On How To Build Environmental Accounting Standards

Since entering the industrial society, human use their creativity to transform nature and create great material wealth to meet their needs while productivity continued to rise, it is unoptimistic that while economic development has greatly increased, we do not deal well with the relationship among economic development and ecological environment, having resulted in global environmental pollution and ecological damage and being a serious threat to human survival and development. It has become a problem urgently needed to resolve in today’s society of mankind to use the natural resources reasonable and effectively, protect the ecological environment and realize the sustainable development of economy and society. Environmental issues have become a common challenge faced by all countries in the world and all countries have sustainable development as an important issue of national development, environmental accounting generated in above context and continue to develop. Until today, the major developed countries and relevant international organizations have achieved fruitful results and some countries have published guidelines and announcements to guide their environmental accounting practice, learning the advanced experience and achievements from developed countries and international organizations is helpful to the construction of environmental accounting of our country.Since the United Nations released a special reports on environmental accounting in the 1990 s, major developed countries and relevant international organizations have issued a series of guidelines and reports on environmental accounting, it is outstanding of Japan on environment accounting in practice, Japanese companies are more voluntary to disclose environmental accounting information and the preparation and disclosure of environmental reports have been more mature.Although our country has issued some laws and regulations on environmental protection at present and many environmental protection measures have been taken, it has restricted the development of environmental accounting practice in our country due to lack of specific feasible environment accounting guidelines. This paper mainly focused on the following two aspects: one is analyzing the conditions and construction model of environment accounting standards in our county through the literature review and induction of the domestic and foreign related research on environmental accounting, taking the national conditions into account. we also put forward some proposals and suggestions on the construction of environmental accounting guidelines in view of the main environmental accounting elements; the second aspect is the introduction of the environmental accounting standards or similar rules established by the world’s major countries and international organizations in order to provide reference to build relevant guidelines in our county and establish environment accounting standards suitable for our national conditions gradually.Considering that the United Nations international accounting and reporting standards intergovernmental expert working group(ISAR)、 Ministry of the Environment in Japan and relevant authorities in America are relatively mature on environmental accounting research and have issued a series of relevant principles and reports on environmental accounting,so this paper mainly use normative research method, namely using theoretical analysis and comparative methods to study relevant provisions, this paper mainly summarize and analyze the relevant environmental accounting principles and announcements, released by the above-mentioned countries and international organizations.This paper firstly illustrates the theoretical significance and practical significance for the construction of environmental accounting guidelines in the introduction, then the theoretical basis, and basic theory of the environmental accounting are analyzed. To have the environmental cost as the main line, the relevant contents about four major environmental accounting elements, namely environmental costs, environmental liabilities, environmental assets and environmental benefits on environmental guidelines issued by the above states and international organizations were introduced briefly In the main part of this paper, and make comparison with the present accounting standard on environmental accounting elements for business enterprises in our country, we can learn and absorb related provisions and achievements on environment accounting in foreign countries to supplement and perfect our current standards. Based on the reading and combing domestic and foreign literatures related to environmental accounting and the corresponding information disclosure, the content of environmental accounting information disclosure is illustrated, this paper argues the environment accounting information that enterprises should disclose include the impacts of enterprise environmental activities have on the financial conditions and operating results and environmental performance or environmental performance achieved by enterprise environmental protection activities, the financial impact of the environmental problems can be divided into the impacts of environmental problems on static balance sheet, profit statement and the impact of environmental issues on dynamic cash flow statement. As to the problem how we disclose environmental accounting information, this paper argues that we can use independent report forms to disclose environmental accounting information, this paper argues that we can establish an independent environmental balance sheet, environmental profit statement, environmental cash flow statement environmental performance table and related schedules to completely convey the enterprise environmental accounting information in reference to the traditional financial report system.On the basis of analysis on related standards on environmental accounting of USA and Japan, this paper argues that we can attempt to establish independent environmental accounting standard system when environmental accounting become more mature. Analysis on the traditional pattern that the major countries Release and implement environmental accounting guidelines,this paper find that America and Japan are different in the way of establishing environmental accounting guidelines, namely accounting standards of America are usually set by the civil institutions under the supervision of the government, while the government mainly Ministry of the Environment,is predominate in establishing accounting standards in Japan. In our country, it is mainly the ministry of finance that shall be responsible for the formulation and implementation of accounting standard, and the ministry of finance has rich experience in standard setting at the same time, this paper argues that the ministry of finance should promulgate laws and regulations on environmental accounting step by step, promote the application of environmental accounting among the enterprises, and develop the relevant principles of environmental accounting combined with the needs of the development of environmental accounting practice. In reference to foreign related guidelines of environmental accounting and the contents of the existing accounting standards in our country, this paper put forward the idea of how to set up specific environment accounting standards related main environmental accounting elements.This paper puts forward some Suggestions on the construction of principles of environmental accounting. this paper argues that the foreign research on basic theory of environmental accounting has been relatively mature, and absorb excellent results and outstanding achievements of foreign countries on environmental accounting in order to complement our country’s environmental accounting theoretical system, and organize the special personnel to translate and research foreign relevant guidelines of environmental accounting and announcements to think about the establishment of specific standards in our country; Referring to advanced experience of foreign standards, we can set up a special working group to study the establishment of the specific standards and publish corresponding explanation to supplement of specific standards to attract the participation of professionals from different fields of society and widely listen to the views of the public; Financial accounting standards system is relatively scientific, the ministry of finance can establish environmental accounting standards from the following three aspects: the basic principles,the specific standards and application guidelines of specific standards,environmental accounting standards should be revised and improved along with the development of the environmental accounting practice, the construction of environmental accounting guidelines should insist on the standard of coordination between principle and flexibility,for example, we can provide operational methods of the recognition and measurement of accounting elements for the users to choose from in specific standards, we can give examples or cases of account Settings, Entries and reports presentation in order to provide references to the user.