The accounting concept of environmental liabilities, mirroring the company's environmental risk.

Summary Through the risks that the company poses to the environment or through the risks that it faces as a result of the increasing number of legal obligations aimed at protecting the environment, the company can no longer afford to ignore environmental risk. The requirement to understand environmental risk must now accompany the company throughout its existence. Accounting law, as much for its historical capacity to apprehend risks as in its capacity as the author of the language of the company, appears to be the ideal instrument for identifying and controlling environmental risk. Through the concept of environmental liability, accounting law offers a framework for reading environmental risk that highlights most of the risks associated with this risk. Also through the concept of environmental liability, accounting law reveals its ability to control the harmful consequences that environmental risk has on the company or the environment. The merits of accounting law in the apprehension of corporate environmental risk must not, however, mask an original conception based exclusively on the recognition of the damage done to the financial capital of the company. Because persisting in ignoring environmental capital has the effect of restricting the apprehension of environmental risk, the recasting of accounting law in the sense of integrating environmental capital offers accounting law the opportunity to assert itself as a branch of law which, although specific, is no less alive and as such, capable of evolution.