Green Accounting as a Driver of Sustainable Development: A Study on a Sample of Highly Polluting Industrial Companies in Iraq

Abstract

The research aims to clarify the impact of implementing green accounting on achieving sustainable development, and to elucidate the nature of the relationship between the level of accounting environmental disclosure and sustainability indicators in highly polluting industrial sectors, primarily: chemical industries, energy and refineries, metal industries, and high-emission food industries, serving as an empirical model for highly polluting industrial companies in Iraq. The study was conducted on (160) large and medium-sized industrial enterprises. It focuses particularly on highly polluting industrial sectors and the resulting inflation of apparent economic efficiency indicators and the concealment of real costs borne by communities and the environment. The results revealed a wide gap between traditional economic efficiency and true green efficiency, reflecting efficiency inflation caused by the concealment of environmental costs. Furthermore, the gap analysis revealed that Iraqi industrial companies suffer from complete structural gaps in six international standards for environmental disclosure, most notably the GRI 305 standard for measuring emissions, the IFRS S2 standard for climate risk disclosure, and the ISO 14001 certification for environmental management systems. Accordingly, we recommend that major industrial companies establish independent environmental accounting units under the supervision of the Ministries of Planning and Environment, allowing for an accurate and fair application of the 'Polluter Pays' principle based on isolated data for each facility.

Keywords: Green Accounting, Sustainable Development, Environmental Disclosure, Highly Polluting Industries.