Articles
DOI DOI: 10.62441/actainnovations.v63i.1362

THE MISSING MONETARY LAYER: ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE WITHOUT ENVIRONMENTAL COST ACCOUNTING IN AN EMERGING MARKET

Mohammed Alomair 1
  1. 1 Department of Accounting, School of Business, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

Environmental information reaches stakeholders through narrative statements, physical quantities and monetary amounts recognised or disclosed within accounting systems. This research note asks whether those layers co-exist in an emerging market. An item-level content analysis of 120 non-financial firms listed on the Saudi Exchange over 2021–2023 (357 firm-years, 12,495 item scores) finds that disclosed environmental cost accounting is absent. Across all 1,785 item observations of that sub-dimension, no firm separated environmental costs from operating costs, disclosed prevention, remediation or waste-management costs in monetary terms, reported an environmental fine, or allocated environmental costs to products or sites. The result is reproducible: an independent blind human coder assigned zero to 351 of 355 sampled item observations, an exact agreement of 98.9 per cent. Physical environmental measurement, by contrast, is present in 99.2 per cent of firm-years, with only 13.3 per cent of its item observations absent. Because the full 35-item ordinal instrument did not achieve acceptable inter-coder reliability (ordinal Krippendorff’s α = 0.113), every claim in this note is restricted to the presence-or-absence boundary and no result is reported that depends on the finer ordinal gradations. Within that restriction, the climate disclosure and green accounting indices correlate at 0.935, and because measurement error attenuates observed correlations, this figure is a lower bound on the association between the two constructs. The contribution is that public environmental reporting can be extensive in physical form while disclosed monetary environmental cost accounting is entirely absent, and that disclosure indices of this common design require evidence of reproducibility before their gradations are used.

How to Cite

Alomair , M. (2026). THE MISSING MONETARY LAYER: ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE WITHOUT ENVIRONMENTAL COST ACCOUNTING IN AN EMERGING MARKET. ACTA INNOVATIONS, 63, 1124–1133. https://doi.org/10.62441/actainnovations.v63i.1362
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