Impact of Environmental Accounting Measures on Environmental Costing Disclosure in Libyan Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

The oil and gas industry is among the industries that have the greatest impact on the environment due to the nature of industrial processes. It also increases the amount of hazardous waste generated by the industry. In recent years, the focus has shifted to social and environmental issues and the need to disclose environmental information has emerged, both through annual financial reports, through other means of disclosure. Therefore, aim of this particular study is to identify the antecedents of weak environmental cost disclosure in Libyan oil and gas industry by examining the impact of environment accounting measures. The proposed design has five constructs as antecedents: Accounting Practices (AP), Accounting Standards (AS), Law and Policies (LP), Organisation Awareness (OA), Public Auditing (PA); and one outcome variable, Environmental Costing Disclosure. The population for this research is all the Libyan employees of financial accounting related jobs in oil and gas industry in Libya, and the samples were collected from seven organisations. Questionnaire is the main instrument for collecting data, the questionnaire is built based on different sources from previous studies.  Participant opinion for the variables shows that Environmental costing disclosure has a lower rate of 46.2% and all other perceptions are in similar level. The five antecedents have significant relations and can explain up to 38% of the Environmental Costing Disclosure variance