The Impact of Digital Technologies on Environmental Management Accounting. The Case of Italian Local Governments

This paper aims to discuss the impact of external shocks on the adoption of digital technologies to support Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) in Local Governments (LGs), and how this support contributes to enhance organizational resilience by anticipating negative externalities. In doing so, we analyzed an Italian municipality that suffered strong negative impacts caused by floods in 2023. This research is mainly based on interviews with relevant actors and publicly available documents. We focus on the contribution of digital technologies and EMA to the anticipation of and the ability to cope with crisis, by analyzing different temporal phases (before, during, and after the flood). This allows to understand the digital technology need to support EMA for enhancing organizational resilience and how this has changed due to external shocks influence. Indeed, results show that the flood heavily impacted the adoption of digital technology to support EMA, by increasing the awareness of the need for timely and integrated data to facilitate prompt actions and engagement, reducing negative impacts. The relevance of this study lies in discussing environmental accounting in LGs within the context of a natural disaster, which still needs remarkable consideration. Also, attention has been paid to digital technologies and related EMA implications, offering insights into how resilience may be achieved in practice.