Current Professional Responses to Corporate Environmental Accounting

Private sector and public sector organizations, including private listed companies, government departments, statutory authorities and government business enterprises are under increasing pressure to disclose information about the organization's interaction with the natural and physical environment. In some instances, changes have been demanded by parliamentary committees which signal increasing scrutiny of environmental disclosures in annual reports.Australian professional pronouncements and research studies into environmental disclosures in the private and public sector are scarce and therefore little guidance exists on how this information should be disclosed.This paper seeks to address this deficiency by: providing a synthesis of research on environmental disclosures in annual reports; report on a recent survey of environmental disclosure in Australian public and private sector entities; and provide the germane of a benchmark reference for the evaluation of environmental disclosures in private public sector annual reports.