Environmental resource accounting frameworks for the public domain and public trust managements

Abstract

To facilitate a redesign of current economic and legal institutions to protect the environmental resource basis of material well-being, this paper proposes a new type of micro-accounting called environmental resource accounting (ERA) and illustrates its usefulness in terms of several practical examples. ERA consists of the preparation of a periodic environmental balance sheet and the statement of physical input and output, where key terminologies such as environmental assets, environmental liabilities, and (net) environmental capital are defined in terms of the functional theory of resources and of physical and legal characteristics constraining an accounting entity’s management of environmental resources. Illustrative examples clearly show an advantage of public trust management over public domain management in enabling government to take precautionary action and the useful role of ERA in supplying physical and legal information complementing the current public development corporation’s financial accounting system. The paper also discusses how ERA is related to two representative modification systems of national accounting.