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The current biodiversity loss is dramatic. Over the past 50 years, more than 68% of the mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish on earth have disappeared, putting the planet's survival and its inhabitants – including human beings – at risk (WWF, 2020). Financialization, or the transformation of nature into financial assets, is increasingly proposed as a solution to the biodiversity crisis. Proponents of financialization believe that assigning a monetary value to nature will incentivize human beings to protect habitats and their species. This article offers a four-mechanism model of nature’s financialization, explaining why it is virtually impossible to financialize nature. We collected data through a unique two-stage data collection process, including a single case study and additional interviews with conservationists and conservation finance specialists. We analyzed the development of a calculative device, the “Index,” designed to assess the impact of conservation efforts on the survival of endangered species. Conservationists hoped to use the Index to calculate the financial return of a conservation impact bond (CIB), a financial instrument designed to finance conservation projects. However, they did not achieve their goal. We discuss the implications for the financialization and conservation literature and the role of accounting therein. We notably question previous accounts of financialization, including the need for financial numbers or financial actors. We ultimately show that a financialization project can transform practices towards financialization, even if the financialization process is not complete.

International audience

International audience; This Special Issue originates from the 4th French Conference on Social and Environmental Accounting Research (4th CSEAR France Conference) that took place in May 2017 at Toulouse Business School. This conference, which has been taking place every two years since 2011, consolidates a growing network of French and international researchers interested in social and environmental accounting (SEA). While this Special Issue is in collaboration with the 4th CSEAR France Conference, the Call for Papers was open and public, hence welcoming any researcher interested in the French context to submit a manuscript.

International audience; This Special Issue originates from the 4th French Conference on Social and Environmental Accounting Research (4th CSEAR France Conference) that took place in May 2017 at Toulouse Business School. This conference, which has been taking place every two years since 2011, consolidates a growing network of French and international researchers interested in social and environmental accounting (SEA). While this Special Issue is in collaboration with the 4th CSEAR France Conference, the Call for Papers was open and public, hence welcoming any researcher interested in the French context to submit a manuscript.

The corporate reporting landscape has evolved in the last 20 years from financial reporting to sustainability reporting to “integrated reporting.” The corporate reporting history abounds with different attempts at integrating sustainability accounting with financial accounting (e.g., the Corporate Report 1975 and the “Triple Bottom Line” concept) and thereby attempting to report in an integrated manner. The first corporate integrated reports appeared in 2002, but the new trend remained in the margins. Since 2010, the IIRC (International Integrated Reporting Council) has led the work on building the first Integrated Reporting (IR) framework, published in December 2013. The accounting profession has played a crucial role in pushing the idea of integrated reporting forward. Now it is looking at how it can best participate in IR corporate practice. This report is aimed at accountants who would like to get involved more closely, or even drive, the IR efforts within their company. We begin with an overview of the origins of IR combined with calls for its development, emphasizing the role of the accounting profession in the development of this new corporate reporting framework. Then we discuss the benefits of IR, centered on the holistic thinking it can foster in companies, enabling them to reconsider sustainability challenges and leveraging a stakeholder-inclusive approach to corporate reporting. We then focus on the involvement of accountants within the implementation of IR. Finally, we elaborate on today’s challenges for IR, which include developing a materiality matrix, designing a project mode for the first IR publication process, designing integrated information systems, and navigating the legal environment surrounding IR. The report is based on participative observation within a leading multinational company—pilot of the IIRC—semi-structured interviews with international experts and other multinational companies on their IR journey, as well as documentary evidence collected from 2011 to 2015.

Purpose –The paper investigates the body of literature on environmental management accounting (EMA) and provides a quantitative overview of the academic as well as the professional literature constituting the field. By doing so, the paper discusses whether EMA has developed as a discipline.Based on a database containing 814 (396 of them published in academic journals) publications in English, German and French with a publication date prior to 2012 a bibliometric analysis is conducted. Data on the publications, journals, authors and citations were collected, double-checked and examined by applying bibliometric measures.The bibliometric analysis identifies trends in EMA research publications which show that EMA has developed as a young discipline, but is still faces challenges to get better established in mainstream accounting and management research. Although the publication number is growing, a substantial part of the publications have been published outside mainstream accounting journals in non-accounting journals, books and reports. A recent trend towards establishing specialised environmental (and sustainability) accounting journals is also rendered apparent. The low number of highly cited publications of few authors, however, indicates that EMA is still to become a mainstream field of research. The paper discusses with the help of bibliometric analysis and measures whether EMA has developed as a discipline and whether it has become part of mainstream accounting research.

Carbon accounting is a relatively new research area. Whereas corporate carbon accounting is important for external stakeholders to receive a true and fair representation of an organization’s carbon footprint and efforts in emissions reduction, organizational management issues of carbon accounting are highly relevant with regard to decision making, performance improvement and what is reported. In contrast to the reporting, stakeholder and regulatory focus, company-internal issues of carbon accounting have so far rarely been investigated in depth. By analysing an in depth case study of an organization’s “convergence project” between two corporate accounting approaches, we raise questions about what should be considered an effective environmental accounting framework.