Editorial: Carbon capture, financial development, and sustainable energy

With the rapid growth in renewable energy technologies and financial innovations in areas of environmental sustainability, the methods of carbon capture and carbon accounting are high not only on the political but also on economic agendas. Paris Agreement has attempted to control double accounting of carbon emissions through the “corresponding adjustments” in which a country that sells its carbon credits must deduct them from the nationally determined contributions. Multiple stakeholders with competing goals are involved in carbon emissions making accounting a truly complicated process.

This Research Topic addresses three key themes related to carbon accounting. First, articles in the issue recognize that the proper accounting of carbon emissions is a complex multistakeholder process that requires strong coordination and careful enforcement and verification of standards to be successful looking through 137 studies, Hazaea et al. have found that so far the academic literature has been interested in studying the impact of various characteristics of companies and consumers on the accounting methods and carbon mitigation. Much less attention has been paid to economic and behavioral theories, particularly when it comes to voluntary carbon disclosures. Carbon accounting should operate in multiple dimensions and integrate national, project, organizational, and product scales into a coherent system. However, the signs of global multilevel concerted efforts are missing as the United Kingdom, Australia, and China are setting the discourse framework, while others have not paid enough attention to this problem yet. Our authors recommend more attention be paid to the carbon emissions from real financial reporting to work out more rigorous international standards and improve the verification process. Strict international standards coupled with unified financial reporting will significantly ease the performance evaluation of different actors involved in carbon emissions.

Second, the articles in the Research Topic also pay attention to the accounting strategies claiming that unconventional approaches to incorporating digitalized local and international factors into accounting models can be very effective in supporting market dynamics and predicting carbon mitigation. Digitalization of local factors also plays a crucial role in decreasing potential conflict between state and society. For example, Bykowa et al. develop a model of digital cadastral appraising that goes beyond the national standards to show that local factors, such as soil quality, environmental health, proximity to waste storage, and cell towers do have an impact on property valuation that need to be included into the models. Based on the case of Russia, the authors argue that social tensions can decrease if land appraisals include local-pricing factors. The state-led accounting models play an important role in accounting for carbon mitigation.