Sustainability Accounting in Focus: A Human-Centric Approach to Corporate Responsibility

This work considers how the corporate responsibility in the oil industry of Iraq can be advanced through the human-centric sustainability accounting framework. It proposes to adopt a hybridisation formula where quantitative environmental performance figures (generated out of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), GHG Protocol, and environmental cost benefits models) are chained together with qualitative knowledge of semi-structured interviews on the same three analysts of engineers, financial officers and CSR managers. The information drawn was based on internal company reports, national environmental databases, satellite images, and corporate CSR reports. Findings show that the addition of engineering measures to financial accounting provides a more open and comprehensive picture of environmental consequences, but also makes human-centric stories prominent, which go beyond compliance-driven CSR. Other major findings relate to the high level of under-reporting of the indirect environmental costs, inconsistency between the report on sustainability performance and the actual impacts at the ground level, and a highly favoured reporting model by the practitioners involves participatory and practice, stakeholder-inclusive reporting. Such insights can be applied in increasing the transparency, decision making, and community confidence in high-impact sectors, especially when they are approached in an environment of lax regulation. It has been observed that the proposed framework can be replicated in other extractive industries and emerging economies that would like to change the sustainability accounting to suit global rules and national human realities.
Unique Contribution
This study combines engineering-centric environmental measurements with financial and storytelling accounting of sustainability, providing a practical and human-based concept that suits the oil industry in Iraq, where CSR is often limited to meeting standards.