Environmental Reporting of Market Leaders: An Analysis

In the light of global warming and environmental concerns across the globe, environmental accounting and reporting has now become an emerging reality and necessity of the corporate world. Considering the same, the present paper is based on an exploratory study carried out to have an understanding of the nature and extent of environmental reporting practices followed by the market leaders (MLs). An attempt has been made to analyse the annual reports of the selected companies in order to examine their environmental disclosure practices with reference to the type of the disclosure, section where such disclosure is made and the extent of mandatory and voluntary disclosures made. An index of environmental disclosure, listing 23 items of information, was constructed after surveying the literature to find out the nature of disclosure practices in these companies. This index was further sub-divided into three groups to find out the thrust of environmental disclosures by the sample companies. It was found that majority of the MLs reported the mandatory environmental information in the ‘Director's Report’, whereas the voluntary information was disclosed either in the ‘Highlights’ or in the ‘Dedicated Section’ of the annual report, followed by the ‘Management Discussion Analysis’ and the ‘Corporate Governance Report’ sections. A growing trend of reporting environmental information voluntarily was observed. Almost all the MLs have had environmental management systems in place by 2013. All except one ML prepared the business responsibility report, as mandated by the Securities Exchange Board of India. Further, neither the firm nor the governance characteristics had any significant impact on the environmental performance of the MLs. Hence, it was concluded that steps taken by the MLs towards environmental conservation was independent of board independence, size, leverage or profitability and that MLs were committed to the cause of environmental sustainability.