Sustainability and Risk Disclosure: An Exploratory Study on Sustainability Reports

Elisa Truant, Laura Corazza and Simone Domenico Scagnelli
Additional contact information
Elisa Truant: Department of Management, University of Turin, Corso Unione Sovietica 218 bis, 10134 Turin, Italy
Laura Corazza: Department of Management, University of Turin, Corso Unione Sovietica 218 bis, 10134 Turin, Italy
Simone Domenico Scagnelli: Department of Management, University of Turin, Corso Unione Sovietica 218 bis, 10134 Turin, Italy

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 4, 1-20

Abstract: Recent policy changes in sustainability reporting, such as the ones related to the new European Directive on non-financial disclosure (2014/95/EU), the standards issued by the American Sustainability Accounting Standard Board (SASB), the G4 guidelines issued by the Global Sustainability Standard Board (GSSB), and the framework of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) stress the importance of extending the disclosure of ethical, social, and environmental risks within financial and social-environmental reporting. Institutional pressure has notably increased among organizations, in setting up risk management tools to understand sustainability risks within managerial and reporting practices. Given such institutional pressure, the corporate reaction in providing additional sustainability risk disclosure calls for attention and scrutiny. Therefore, this study aims at addressing such issues from an exploratory perspective. We based our analysis on a sample of large Italian organizations that issued sustainability disclosure in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), G4 guidelines, and we tested the relationship between their level of risk disclosure and other relevant variables. Consistently with the literature, we found that “experienced” sustainable reporters provide a significant volume of disclosure, and that disclosure quality on risk is positively influenced by their international presence and reporting experience. However, when accounting for specific risk-related areas of disclosure, only a few of them seem to adopt a managerial perspective linking strategy, risk metrics, and disclosure.

Keywords: social and environmental risks disclosure; sustainability reporting; G4 sustainability reporting guidelines; Global Reporting Initiative (GRI); management accounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/4/636/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/4/636/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:4:p:636-:d:96096

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().