Business and the Environment:performance and reporting?

Abstract

Environmental management within businesses has grown in importance to both managers and researchers. Recently there have been clear signs of corporate strategy being influenced by environmental pressures. Over the past decade the quantity and perceived importance of environmental reporting has increased significantly. Increasingly “sustainability” is being given as an objective of many businesses, however, it has been said that this is a complex and almost impossible challenge. In order to address the issue of whether corporate environmental reports provide accurate information on business’ activities and performance, three research questions were investigated; do different types of environmental report provide different types of information, does the content of the environmental reports represent business’ actual environmental performance and whether there is a common “environmental reporting language”. The main method of analysis was qualitative content analysis of the environmental reports of 15 UK companies. The reports were analysed to show the key themes and the information they provided as well as highlighting the extent to which certain language words and phrases were used. The content analysis for each report was presented in the form of a matrix. The research suggests that the type of report does not influence the type of information provided, that in many cases environmental reports do not appear to represent business’ actual environmental performance and that environmental reports use the same language and labels to discuss their environmental impacts, management systems and compliance, therefore, there is evidence for a common “environmental reporting language”. Overall the research attempted to shed some light on the reliability of information provided in environmental reports and established what may affect this reliability.