حسابداری مدیریت آب: یک چارچوب برای تمرین شرکتی Water management accounting: A framework for corporate practice

1. Introduction Environmental management accounting (EMA) was developed in the 1990s to highlight the decision settings, tools and types of information different managers need to manage the combined economic and environmental aspects of their business activities (Burritt et al. 2002). Although EMA has previously been extended to consider specific elements of environmental importance, such as carbon (Burritt et al. 2011; Schaltegger and Csutora 2012; Gibassier and Schaltegger 2015), an explicit focus on corporate water management is only a recent development. The lack of previous attention is remarkable given water is an important part of natural capital (Hoekstra 2009) required to support ongoing corporate activities. With the growing water crisis and need for better data for water management by corporations (Morrison et al., 2010) the research problem addressed is to examine the importance of accounting in the context of corporate water management. The corporate sector remains careless in relation to precious water management activities and relevant accounting information is needed to support and encourage better decisions. The paper extends the EMA literature to incorporate an explicit focus on water and water management. Thus a sub-discipline, water management accounting or WMA, is established. The paper then considers how WMA can provide a framework for corporate water-related activity and assist in helping managers to understand the decision settings in which different water accounting tools are useful and applicable. This is an important step forward given the lack of consistency and cohesion in current approaches to corporate water accounting many of which focus on transparency and not the management of resources by organisations per se. The lack of tools to support monetary water-related decisions with granular data is also highlighted.