Q56 - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population GrowthReturn

Climate change and climate neutrality targets for 2050 in the case of the EU bring the need for effective environmental policy instruments. Environmental taxes, green innovations, carbon pricing, emission allowances and other instruments are attracting increasing attention in academic as well as economic and environmental policy debates. This paper provides a detailed review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of policy instruments in the path towards climate neutrality, in particular on the effectiveness of environmental taxes, innovations, and established policies across the globe. A separate section also examines the two most widely used approaches for putting a price on carbon – carbon taxes and emission allowances. Environmental policy instruments are combined, however, none of them alone contributes to significant environmental improvements, as confirmed by several major studies. But stricter regulation and improved instruments go a long way towards achieving climate neutrality.

This article focuses on non-financial reporting under SASB standards in Europe andis primarily motivated by the development of new ESG reporting frameworks,namely the European Sustainability Reporting Standards under Directive (EU)2022/2464 and Sustainability Disclosure Standards within IFRS. The articleexamines a sample of 110 European companies from various industries in terms ofthe degree of compliance with the requirements of the SASB standards. Usinga document analysis of non-financial reports and a set of double-level metrics, thescope and relevance of published non-financial information is assessed. It is found that European companies largely meet the requirements of SASB standards.Information about the environmental matters is published to the greatest extent. Nosignificant effect of the sector to which the company belongs on the scope ofpublished information is found.

The paper defines enterprise environmental management systems (EMS) to formulate the positions and functions of environmentally oriented management accounting (EMA) subsequently. It is accounted for, that EMA plays very important role during preparation and installation of EMS and - moreover - that it has a crucial role during operating of the system. Strength of this system lies in its orientation on value and physical information not only ex post, but ex ante as well. Financial accounting is still not yet oriented on presentation of information with the impact on sustainable development, even though its conceptual framework does not hamper it.