Integrating Environmental Cost Accounting in Shipping Companies: A Critical Review of Implementation Barriers and Strategic Management Implications

Greenhouse gas emissions from maritime transport are now priced, audited and contractually allocated, yet no study in the corpus reviewed here provides firm-level evidence on how shipping companies measure, allocate and use these costs internally. This critical, integrative review addresses environmental cost accounting in shipping management, synthesizing environmental management accounting (EMA), carbon accounting, material flow cost accounting, maritime economics and ESG research. Deliberately comparative, it confronts competing positions on measurement quality, regulatory pressure, implementation barriers and the ESG–performance relationship. Three findings emerge. First, the documented evidence shows that shipping firms respond to carbon pricing through pass-through and rerouting, while the reviewed literature provides little direct evidence that these data are systematically used in internal environmental costing and management control. Second, read jointly, the two bodies of literature imply that barriers operate interdependently across technical, organizational, economic and contractual levels, shipping’s mobile cost objects and owner–charterer structures invalidating assumptions of land-based EMA research. Third, emerging asset-pricing, financing and chartering evidence suggests that environmental costing capability is beginning to function as a competitive advantage. These findings inform the Pressure–Absorption–Integration–Outcomes (PAIO) framework, distinguishing compliance-level, decision-level and strategy-level integration and yielding six research items that address this gap.