“The role of environmental performance in mediating the relationship between green accounting and corporate social responsibility”

The problems of pollution, global warming, and environmental damage are currently relevant and vital challenges for corporations, governments, and society. The implementation of green accounting is one of the responses of corporations to overcome sustainability issues. This study aims to examine the impact of green accounting on the level of environmental performance and the impact of environmental performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. This study also tests the role of environmental performance as a mediating variable in the relationship between green accounting and CSR disclosure. The sample consists of 95 listed Indonesian firms during the period 2017–2021. The results show that the adoption of green accounting positively affects environmental performance (coefficient is 0.291 and p -value < 0.01). Meanwhile, environmental performance positively affects CSR disclosure with a coefficient of 0.296 and a p -value < 0.01. The empirical evidence also shows that environmental performance has a critical role as a mediating variable in the effect of green accounting on CSR disclosure.


INTRODUCTION
Currently, the world is facing pollution, global warming, environmental damage, and mismanagement of natural resources; this has given rise to sustainability issues.The exploitation of natural resources and the environment is increasingly worrying as it is causing various kinds of environmental damage and disasters that threaten the lives of every living creature.Company management worldwide is expected to support sustainable development goals to overcome these environmental problems.Companies must adopt business strategies that can meet their needs while preserving the resources future generations may need.The responsibility of company management to manage sustainability issues has encouraged the development of green or environmental accounting.
When the industrial revolution, especially manufacturing, had a negative impact on the environment, the role of green accounting in reducing climate change became very important.Therefore, the role of green accounting in reducing climate change became critical.Its implementation is expected to result in better environmental manage-ment.Even though extensive literature and empirical studies support green accounting, the preparation of accounting standards is still in progress.Thus, policymakers, shareholders, non-governmental organizations, and other stakeholders still debate the benefits of adopting green accounting.
Many companies have implemented green accounting; however, it is necessary to estimate its effectiveness.Studies that analyze the role of green accounting in supporting sustainable development are still limited.In addition, there need to be more studies focusing on Indonesia, a developing country, as prior research has generally analyzed green accounting practices in developed countries.Environmental damage significantly affects developing countries due to the large use of non-renewable energy.Finally, there is a need to analyze the mechanism or process of the positive effects of green accounting on environmental performance and disclosure.Such an analysis can contribute to filling the research gap.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES
This study uses the legitimacy theory and signaling theory to develop the research model.The legitimacy theory is generally used to support research on accounting concerning environmental and social issues.According to Brown and Deegan (1998), the legitimacy theory explains that a company or organization strives to ensure that operations are in accordance with ethics, rules, and culture found in society.
Based on the legitimacy theory, companies disclose their environmental management to fulfill the social contract (Deegan, 2022;Burlea & Popa, 2013).Through the legitimacy theory, a company's involvement in green accounting can be associated with better reporting of revenue figures.This can influence public perceptions so they are favorable toward the company's image ( Through this commitment, Indonesia and other countries are jointly committed to keeping the rise in global temperatures to below 2°C and making efforts to limit global temperatures from rising a further 1.5° above pre-industrial levels.
These regulations indicate that it is critical to mitigate carbon emissions to achieve zero emissions.
Although carbon measurement and disclosure are not mandatory and generally unregulated, many organizations disclose information about their initiatives and actions voluntarily and adopt green accounting (Borghei, 2021).Accounting for measuring and disclosing carbon emissions in Indonesia is still voluntary because there is no obligation for companies; nevertheless, with pressure from society to be more responsive to climate change issues, companies are now starting to implement it.However, the implementation of green accounting -including recording carbon emissions -also has negative implications for companies, including increasing their operating costs (Nursulistyo et al., 2022).
The signal theory explains that the information conveyed, including information related to environmental impact management, could be an indicator and signal regarding the actual situation and company prospects (Mavlanova et  The company will try to convey information regarding its activities related to environmental issues to provide a positive signal to gain a good reputation (Altarawneh, 2023).
This study aims to analyze the relationship among green accounting, environmental performance, and CSR disclosure.The hypotheses in this study are as follows: H1: Adoption of green accounting has a positive effect on environmental performance.
H2: Environmental performance has a positive effect on CSR disclosure.
H3: Environmental performance mediates the effect of green accounting on CSR disclosure.

METHOD
The population comprises mining, energy, and manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) and participating in the environmental performance assessment program from the Ministry of Environment during the 2017-2021 period.The purposive sampling method was used with the following criteria: 1. Mining, energy, and manufacturing companies listed on IDX for the 2017-2021 period; 2. The company publishes annual reports and sustainability reports for the 2017-2021 period that can be accessed directly via the company website; and 3. It participated in the PROPER program during the 2017-2021 period.
Companies from the mining, energy, and manufacturing industries were chosen for this sample because their production activities have a direct impact on the environment.Based on the determined criteria, 95 firm-years were used in this study's data analysis.
The independent variable is the adoption of green accounting by the companies in the sample, which is measured using three indicators: the use of recycled materials, environmental cost allocation, and renewable energy.The mediating variable is environmental performance measured using the company's achievements in the program as assessed by the Ministry of the Environment.The dependent variable is CSR disclosure measured using the GRI index.This study uses PLS-SEM with WarpPLS 8.0 software for hypotheses testing.  2 shows that the measurement model of the green accounting variable is supported, with a significant coefficient or weight value for these three indicators; in addition, there is no multicollinearity.Likewise, the environmental performance and CSR variable indicators also meet the criteria for a formative measurement model.After the measurement model testing stage is complete, the next stage is testing the structural model.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The inner or structural model was examined by several model fit indices.Table 3 shows that the inner model has a good fit.
Once the goodness of fit evaluation has met the criteria, hypotheses testing is carried out using PLS-SEM to evaluate the path coefficient and its significance.Figure 1 presents the results of the structural model.
The PLS-SEM test results in Figure 1 show that the adoption of green accounting has a significant positive effect on environmental performance (β = 0.291, p-value < 0.01).Thus, environmental performance significantly and positively affects CSR disclosure (β = 0.296, p-value < 0.01).Meanwhile, the direct effect of green accounting adoption on CSR disclosure is not significant, with a p-value of 0.17.These results indicate that the environmental performance variable has a mediating role in the relationship between green accounting adoption    and CSR disclosure.Based on the PLS-SEM estimation results, the results of hypotheses testing can be summarized as presented in Table 4.
The PLS-SEM test results presented in Table 4 show that the adoption of green accounting positively influences environmental performance with a path coefficient of 0.291 and significant at alpha 1%.Therefore, empirical evidence supports H1, which states that the adoption of green accounting has a positive effect on environmental performance.Likewise, the study supports H2, states that environmental performance has a positive effect on CSR disclosure.This is indicated by a path coefficient of 0.296 and is significant at an alpha of 1%.
The next stage is testing H3, which analyzes the mediation variable of environmental performance in the relationship between green accounting adoption and CSR disclosure.Mediation testing is carried out using procedures developed by Hair et al. (2022).The results of the mediation hypothesis testing are presented in Table 5.
According to this procedure, the mediation analysis is based on the results of standardized path coefficient (direct and indirect effect) significance testing with the PLS-SEM bootstrapping procedure (Nitzl et al., 2016;Hair et al., 2022).Table 5 shows that the indirect effect of green accounting adoption on CSR disclosure through environmental performance is significant, with an indirect effect path coefficient of 0.086 and a p-value of 0.017.These results support H3.The PLS-SEM test results presented in Table 5 show that the di-rect effect of green accounting on CSR disclosure is not significant, with a path coefficient of 0.096 and a p-value of 0.169.Environmental performance positively affects CSR disclosure, which is proxied using the GRI Index.The higher the company's ranking in environmental performance, the greater the company's tendency to disclose relevant data.On the other hand, a decrease in environmental performance is followed by a decrease in the company's

CONCLUSION
The objective of this paper was to analyze the impact of green accounting on the level of environmental performance and the effect of environmental performance on CSR disclosure.The result shows that environmental accounting positively affects environmental performance, which in turn increases CSR.These findings imply that companies should implement green or environmental accounting to support sustainable development goals.Green accounting has advantages over conventional accounting, as it takes into account the pollution cost and the effect of company operations on the environment.In addition, green accounting measures and records the costs of depletion of natural resources and changes in environmental quality.This study also has implications for the government's role in ranking environmental performance and encouraging the adoption of green accounting in order to increase CSR disclosure.
This study has several limitations, including how it measures green accounting adoption by using just the three proxies: the recycling of material, environmental costs, and renewable energy.These three proxies are the best for measuring green accounting research using quantitative methods; however, they are limited in observing the implementation of green accounting adoption in detail.Future research could consider using qualitative methods to analyze green accounting practices in companies in depth.In addition, because of the sample selection process, generalizations are limited to certain industries.Future studies are expected to expand the sample and context to other countries.Future research could also consider the relationship between corporate governance and green accounting adoption.

Table 1
(Hair et al., 2022) PLS-SEM method for hypotheses testing because there is a latent variable, namely the adoption of green accounting.The PLS-SEM was conducted in two steps: measurement/outer and structural/inner models(Hair et al., 2022).

Table 1 .
Descriptive statistics Note: RM = Use of Recycled Materials; EC = Environmental Costs; RE = Renewable Energy; EP = Environmental Performance; CSR = CSR Disclosure.

Table 2 .
Measurement model evaluation

Table 3 .
Model fit indices

Table 4 .
Path coefficients and p-values

Table 5 .
Mediation effect test