ABSTRACT
This chapter describes global trends in environmental auditing and especially in environmental performance auditing. The extensive audit mandate of many Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) gives them the opportunity to assess how all levels of government are working to protect the environment. The Working Group on Environmental Auditing describes three types of cooperative audits: concurrent, joint and coordinated audits. A comparison between the two for the common period showed that compared with performance audits, the percentage of compliance audits decreased. Generally, the developed country SAIs focus on performance auditing of quality-of-life environmental issues, such as climate change, whereas developing country SAIs concentrate on subsistence environmental matters such as water supply and sanitation. The relationship between the average per capita national income of individual countries that produced some environmental performance audits and their output of environmental performance audits. The progress in global environmental performance audits has been both in terms of magnitude and distribution.
