Global Climate Change and Corporate Disclosure: pedagogical tools for critical accounting?

Global Climate Change (GCC) is the most significant environmental concern of our current age and studies such as those by IPCC (2001b); Stern (2006), and IPCC (2007a), have demonstrated the pace with which policies on GCC issues are moving and affecting all parts of society, including organisations that, as a result of existing work, can be held accountable for their actions. The literature on accounting education suggests that the use of social and environmental reporting as a pedagogical tool could spearhead emancipation from superficial educational accounting practices. Thus, the main objective of this article is to suggest a practical exercise using GCC disclosure to develop students’ critical accounting perspectives.

This article suggests a checklist with which to analyse GCC disclosure. This checklist was developed from our examination of relevant literature on GCC. We illustrate how the checklist may be used in practice. The use of GCC disclosure as an educational tool may (i) motivate students to understand the main concepts central to GCC issues; (ii) help to critique conservative accounting practices; (iii) guide critical engagement with organisational practices regarding GCC, and (iv) develop students’ interests in accounting for their carbon emissions decisions and activities.