Evolution and status of environmental accounting research

Abstract

Environmental accounting is an area of accounting that has shown an outstanding increase in research, especially since the 1990s, and especially in the last 10 years. All aspects related to sustainability and environmental impact are issues of current social concern and plans and policies are needed for its management and control. Linked to these plans, accounting appears as a facilitator of identification, registration and control of the planned actions to reduce the environmental impact. The present work, after contextualizing this area of study, makes an analysis of the state and evolution of the research in this area, quantifying the publications and determining the most common study topics. For this purpose, a bibliometric review and a deductive content analysis is carried out, as well as a correlation analysis of the most common research topics in environmental accounting. As main results, among the studied topics, they stand out sustainability, sustainable development, environmental impact or climate change, always from a point of view linked to accounting.