ABSTRACT
The expressions 'ecological accounting' and 'ecological statements' used here correspond to the terms used in financial accounting and subsume a variety of expressions such as 'green accounting', 'environmental accounting' and 'green or environmental reporting' . A s i n traditional accounting, the main tasks o f ecological accounting consist o f the classification, collection, recording, allocation, analysis and communication of data. There are, however, some major differences: environmental interventions are measured in physi cal units not in financial units and have to be assessed in physical terms as they usually have no market price. Most assessment methods convert physical units (e.g. kilograms of carbon dioxide [C02] emissions) into artificial units (e.g. ozone-depleting potential [ODP] ) in order to express the environmental impact added by an activity (e.g. emissions of C02) .
