BSBSUS501 Task

2015

This book "Environment Management Accounting in Sri Lankan Enterprises" is the outcome of a mission achieved with the support of many stakeholders. We are pleased to publish the book, which is a product of the involvement and commitment of many persons and institutions. We therefore would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the contributions made by many parties in completing this challenging task. This book would not have been a reality if not for the generous financial assistance of Diesel & Motor Engineering PLC, our sponsor. We wish to extend our sincere gratitude to them for their contribution. Our appreciation is also extended to the companies for the opportunity to observe their worthy environmental practices and for their valuable inputs. The representatives of these various companies spent a great deal of time with us amidst their tight schedules to help us to build our cases studies. We would like to convey our heartfelt appreciation to the Head and other staff of the Department of Accounting, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, for their support. We would especially like to acknowledge the guidance of Prof. Mangala Fonseka of the Department of Accounting for his valuable comments. Our special thanks are also extended to the employers of the authors who released them during working hours for data collection. Without their commitment, this project could not have been completed. We are thankful to Chamara Jayakody, 4thYear undergraduate of the Department of Accounting, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, for designing the cover and text. Our thanks are also due to Mr. Carlton Samarajiwa for copy editing our material and CRC Printers for the hassle-free, timely printing of our book. Finally, we would like to thank our family members who are usually the silent victims of such arduous projects. Their patience helped us immeasurably.

The idea of writing this book occurred to us a long time back but not in a planned way. Having understood the importance of sustainability accounting education, in 2012, at the Department of Accounting, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka, we introduced an elective course unit on Sustainability Management Accounting (SMA), perhaps for the first time in an undergraduate course in the country. As a part of this course unit, the students had to develop a case study on SMA aspects of a selected organization. When visiting various organizations for data collection purposes with students, I witnessed how Sri Lankan companies implemented various environmental management strategies with the help of accounting/numbers. Though very little is written about them, these organizations were doing remarkably well in many respects. When the Department of Accounting held a Forum on Sustainability Management Accounting in 2014 with the primary purpose of educating the business professionals on this emerging field of accounting, we published these case studies in a Special Issue of the Journal of Accounting Panorama on the theme of Sustainability Management Accounting in Sri Lanka. At the Institute of Certified Management Accountants (CMA) National Management Accounting Conference, in June 2014, we pioneered another project to publish Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) Guidelines for Sri Lankan Enterprises. These guidelines were well received by the Sri Lankan business professionals and, in August 2014, I conducted a workshop on Adopting Environmental Management Accounting based on these guidelines. Through these guidelines and the workshop we attempted to address the “What” question with Sri Lankan business professionals in mind. While disseminating knowledge of this discipline through these various means, we felt it was important to address the “How” question also keeping Sri Lankan and international readers in mind. Over the years of our experience with industry engagement, we observed how EMA was applied by Sri Lankan enterprises in different ways. However, little was recorded on how and to what extent EMA was being applied in Sri Lanka or in emerging economies. Therefore we thought it was timely to showcase Sri Lankan examples of EMA applications. This was even highlighted when the Department of Accounting, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, was hosting the Global Conference of Environmental and Sustainability Management Accounting Network (EMAN) in January 2015 in Colombo for the first time in the South Asian Region . I was fortunate to have a set of students (they are now graduates working in different organizations) from the first batch of the Sustainability Management Accounting course unit, who were inspired to engage in an arduous project of this nature. After perusing the literature, we first decided on the chapter plan of this book. The chapters were arranged to showcase EMA practices in different environmental domains such as energy, water, waste and carbon footprint. We originally desired to include a chapter on bio-diversity management and EMA, but due to various practical limitations we had to abandon the topic. The next challenge came when we decided on the industry sectors to be covered under these environmental domains. Though the industries were mainly selected on accessibility criteria we attempted to maintain a mix of industries in each chapter. Ultimately we realized that we had been a little biased towards the apparel industry, but due to its importance in Sri Lanka we thought it was alright to leave it that way. The next biggest challenge was when collecting data for the study. In addition to time constraints we had several other obstacles to overcome. Though we wanted to explore the Sri Lankan enterprises, when collecting data we came across a challenge over the generic definition of “Sri Lankan enterprises”. Some companies who follow noteworthy EMA practices have been largely influenced by the guidelines of their foreign parent companies. Since we wanted to showcase Sri Lankan practices, we decided to select only companies with a Sri Lankan ownership and control (I doubt whether the term “indigenous Sri Lankan enterprises” is the correct word here). Due to this delineation we had to exclude many companies that were pioneers in environmental management in the country. We also encountered another problem with regard to EMA practices. Some companies follow initiatives that are of a pure CSR nature and those projects do not have any relationship with the core businesses. Therefore we had to ignore these EMA practices for which there is no business case. Except for a few exceptions, we visited all the companies described in the book to witness these practices at first hand. We interviewed several managers of each company in charge of these practices. We used an interview guide to better structure our interviews. Moreover, we always referred to various other documents as a means of triangulation. We were surprised when some companies were not at all hesitant to share their very confidential information with us to build our cases. Now, in retrospect, we realized that we had been collecting data for this study over a period of minimum two years, albeit not at the same level of intensity. When collecting data we found that these companies were at different levels of the development stages of EMA. This phenomenon revealed that in some companies there were sophisticated EMA systems in certain environmental domains, while in other domains EMA was e at primitive levels. However, since our focus was on environmental domains we did not have much of a problem here. As I mentioned in the second paragraph the objective of this book is to showcase Sri Lankan EMA practices. An international reader might question why Sri Lanka is important for him/her. Though we have internal validation, we thought it necessary to have some ground for justifying the selection of Sri Lanka. Although the following list is not exhaustive, it provides some justifications for our selection. The list below highlights the natural endowments of Sri Lanka and the challenges to preserve the natural environment while pursuing economic development:

A study on the relevance of soft skills in the hospitality industry with focus on ITM Hotel Management Institute Analyzing the gap in the Indian technical education system Women in higher education in the state of Manipur 2 Disclaimer:

2009

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