Environmental sustainability disclosures in annual reports of ASX Industrials List companies

Andrej Miklosik (), Peter Starchon () and Milos Hitka ()
Additional contact information
Andrej Miklosik: Comenius University in Bratislava
Peter Starchon: Comenius University in Bratislava
Milos Hitka: Technical University in Zvolen

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2021, vol. 23, issue 11, No 25, 16227-16245

Abstract: Abstract Corporate environmental sustainability reporting (CESR) has been linked to the social license to operate, assisting companies in communicating their environmental performance, and through it, increasing transparency and maintaining stakeholder relationships. This study examines how topics related to environmental sustainability are disclosed in annual reports of companies from the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) Industrials List. The investigation was performed by means of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of annual reports to identify relevant keyword occurrences. A keyword indicator list was created by combining four topics from the GRI G3 disclosure checklist/GRI Standards with other four relevant topics. Results revealed the differences in the number of environmental disclosures between individual companies and between industry groups. The existence of a relationship between the extent of CESR on one side and company size, sector, and share price on the other was confirmed. In addition to providing practical implications, this study also contributes to theory by addressing the issue of the limited applicability of GRI keywords as CESR indicators.

Keywords: Australian stock exchange (ASX); CESR indicators; Corporate environmental sustainability reporting; Industrial companies; Social license to operate; Stakeholder relationships (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-021-01338-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:endesu:v:23:y:2021:i:11:d:10.1007_s10668-021-01338-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-021-01338-8

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().