About the Book The study of the interactions between business organizations and their natural environments has gained momentum recently under the aegis of social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR), and as a diluted form of response in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Environmental Accounting, Sustainability and Accountability envisages accounting as an effective instrument in improving this interrelationship. It comprehensively describes how organizations can capture their environmental performance and thereby address societal concerns. The book closely explores how organizations can embed care for the environment as fundamental to their functioning. It broadly covers traditional accounting as a measuring instrument, contemporary advances and unresolved problems, alternative perspectives and recent developments. The central idea proposed here is to evolve the environmental accounting framework and bring calculative aspects into sustainability thinking that businesses are responsible for. Among the other important innovative ideas discussed are new costing techniques for waste management, accounting schematics of carbon trade, green information needs of management and the extension of the environmental viewpoint to information systems and technology.
Debnath, Somnath: -
Somnath Debnath received his doctorate from the Birla Institute of Technology, India, for his contribution to incorporating environmental considerations in managerial accounting. He also holds a master's degree in business administration (MBA) from Walden University, USA, and a master's in technology (MTech) from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Debnath is a Fellow of the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants of India, being a qualified Cost and Management Accountant (CMA), and an academic member of the Athens Institute for Education and Research, Greece, and also of the International Engineering and Technology Institute, Hong Kong. He is a senior solutions architect at Zensar Technologies and a former managing principal at Oracle Corporation.
Debnath's academic interests have been to advance environmental thinking in the field of accounting and in the information sciences, and to support the managements' need for green information beyond the prevailing business constructs, in turn to enable firms to handle sustainability challenges. This includes greening different business functions. His research interests include diverse areas of business such as the decision sciences, project management, systems analysis and design, requirements engineering, green information systems and grey mathematics. He is also a reviewer of a number of academic journals.
In addition, Debnath is a technology expert in the ERP technology space--a subject expert, architect, functional consultant and project manager rolled into one--who has consulted for top Fortune(R) 500 organizations in the last two decades and has supported the industry with business process reengineering and automation needs. To this end, he has been a part of more than 10 full life-cycle ERP implementations and rollouts in different capacities. His latest area of expertise is in cloud-enabled ERP and setting up cloud application centres of excellence for information systems vendors.
