Corporate sustainability and biodiversity reporting: A proactive business strategy to mitigate litigation and reputational risks

Abstract

Biodiversity is important to human's future survival and global sustainability. One way to achieve corporate sustainability is for firms to report its impacts on biodiversity. However, fear of litigation arising from reporting potentially deters corporations to disclose such information. Motivated by the importance of biodiversity and mixed evidence of shareholder litigation rights as a corporate governance tool, we explore whether the universal demand laws (UDLs) have any effect on corporate biodiversity reporting in the United States. Supporting our short-termism, risk aversion and agency hypotheses, we find that an exogenous decline in the threat of derivative litigation, reducing a chance for shareholders to file a lawsuit against top management and intensifying agency costs, economically and significantly decreases a corporate's biodiversity reporting by 87%. When the disciplining effect of shareholder litigation drops, the self-interest manager may want to live a quiet life and disclose less information of biodiversity impact. A proactive business strategy to mitigate litigation and reputational risks is to voluntarily disclose more biodiversity-related information. Regulators around the world should also promote rigorous reporting requirements to reverse biodiversity loss and save our humanity.