Article
Accounting for Catastrophe: Reframing Ecological Loss and Environmental Accountability in the Capitalocene
The growing ecological crises of the 21st century, increasingly understood as part of the Capitalocene, highlight an urgent weakness in our accounting systems: the invisibilization of environmental degradation and ecological loss. This paper advances an interdisciplinary, theoretical approach that combines environmental accounting and ecocritical thinking to explore the role of ecological invisibility in modern reporting. Through the narrative portrayal of the Kedarnath disaster of 2013 in Ved Vilas Uniyal's Havoc in Heaven, the research addresses how disaster tourism, unplanned development and the monetisation of sacred sites create forms of ecological degradation that are invisible to conventional accounting systems. The paper suggests that accounting paradigms, such as sustainability reporting and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, are inherently constrained by their focus on measured, human-centred measures, which fail to account for irreversible changes to the environment, such as biodiversity loss, cultural degradation and ecosystem extinction. Drawing on Capitalocene theory, the paper locates these constraints in the context of capitalist relations that externalise environmental costs and prioritise growth. In turn, the paper recasting ecological damages as a hidden liability and ecosystems as a form of undervalued capital, the study extends the scope of accounting beyond financial reporting. The paper proposes that literary texts can serve as other epistemic spaces for detecting ecological costs, providing qualitative insights into accounting representations. By marrying humanities-based ecological analysis with theoretical accounting perspectives, this research offers new insights into the practice of environmental crisis reporting, value and accountability. It finally proposes more inclusive, ethical accounting frameworks which embed ecological sustainability, intergenerational equity and non-human stakeholders as integral elements of systems of accountability.