Gábor Harangozó

Environmental management practices in the manufacturing sector – Hungarian features in international comparison

The paper provides an overview of the state of corporate environmental management in Hungary compared to older EU and OECD states. It also explores the complex relationship between the implementation of environmental management practices and corporate environmental and business performance. Empirical evidence is taken from a comprehensive piece of research, carried out in OECD member countries, which explored motivation, decision-making procedures, and organisational structure of companies in relation to the design and implementation of environmental management tools and systems.

Twenty Years of Carbon Accounting and Auditing – A Review and Outlook

This paper aims to provide an overview of the key themes in the development of carbon accounting and auditing over the past twenty years. The evolution of the field since the Kyoto Agreement of 1997 has been divided into four stages. The need to account for and disclosure of greenhouse gas-related emissions of industrial organizations has emerged parallel to growing concerns about climate change, and international and national policy developments in the field have followed. Carbon accounting is an emerging field of business economics and covers a wide range of activities, including the measurement, calculation, monitoring, reporting and auditing of greenhouse gas emissions at organizational, process, product or supply chain levels. Various initiatives (such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or the Carbon Disclosure Project) motivate and assist industrial organizations in accounting for and reporting their achievements in the field. Different methodologies of carbon accounting (bottom-up, top-down and hybrid) enable industrial organizations to quantify their emissions; however, some trade-offs emerge when choosing among these approaches. Carbon accounting should not be an isolated task for businesses. On the contrary, there is a strong need to integrate carbon accounting issues into different functional fields in order to achieve both corporate and climate policy goals.