ENVIRONMENTAL ACCOUNTING PRACTICE AND SUSTAINABLE PERFORMANCE OF LISTED MANUFACTURING COMPANIES IN NIGERIA

Striving to attain a significant sustainable performance has been complex and quite challenging for companies operating in most developing economies. Evidence from the research showed that listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria (LMCN)performed below their installed capacities due to infrastructural deficits, security challenges, and high cost of production. Some studies have shown that adequate environmental accounting practice has the capacity to enhance corporate legitimacy, productivity, and desired sustainable performance. Therefore, this study evaluated how environmental accounting practices affected listed manufacturing businesses in Nigeria's sustainable performance. An ex-post facto research design was adopted while data were gathered from the financial statements of the sampled companies using the sustainability index of the Global Reporting Initiative checklist during a 20-year period, from 2003 to 2022, as part of the study's expo facto research approach. 66 manufacturing companies made up the research population. While a total of 16 businesses were purposefully chosen, resulting in 300 observations. The reliability was premised on the external auditors' certification of financial statements. The study used inferential (multiple regression) statistics to analyze the data at a 0.05 level of significance. The study found that environmental accounting practice exerted a positive and significant effect on the sustainable performance of LMCN (Adj.R2 = 0.173; Wald-test (4, 295) = 68.20; p < 0.05). The study concluded that environmental accounting practices influenced the sustainable performance of listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. The study recommended that managers should consider effective environmental accounting practices to deepen sustainable performance in Nigeria.