1. Background

‘Environmental Accounting’ as a term is used to define a wide range of activities.  National environmental accounting considers the use of natural resources and impacts of national policy making. Corporate environmental accounting focuses on individual companies or organisations and is used for controlling and improving a company’s cost structure and environmental performance, and to enhance environmental financial reporting. 

Corporate environmental accounting itself can be sub-divided into environmental management accounting, environmental financial accounting and reporting, and environmental financial auditing.  Environmental management accounting seeks to “account for the financial impacts of all environmentally related activities such as environmental protection and investment, wastage and pollution.  It primarily involves tracking of environmental costs but also allocation of costs to products and activities, investment appraisal and life-cycle costing”. Environmental financial accounting has been described as follows “The main purpose of financial accounting is communication with external stakeholders of the company … The environmental version of financial accounting implies, for example, the preparation of environmental financial reports.”
 
An Expert Working Group on ”Improving the Role of Government in the Promotion of Environmental Management Accounting (EMA)” was set up in 1999 by the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development (UN DSD) in cooperation with a number of government agencies and non-governmental experts to promote Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) through publications, pilot projects and by establishing an international forum for discussion on the role of governments in the promotion of EMA.

Examples of countries represented on the Expert Working Group on Environmental Management Accounting are: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UK, and the USA.

Regional environmental management accounting networks were established as a direct result of the activities of this Expert Working Group.  Africa was, until the middle of 2005, the only region lacking a formalised network.

On 4 and 5 August 2005 fifty delegates from all over the country gathered for the first Environmental Management Accounting [EMA] Workshop in Africa at the campus of the Tshwane University of Technology.  This was the first event arranged by the newly established initiative for an Environmental Management Accounting Network in Africa [EMAN-Africa].  This initiative was supported by representatives from the Chamber of Mines, Tshwane University of Technology, the Dept of Defence, Kumba Resources, the Auditor General’s office and the University of Pretoria.