Environmental Sustainability Reporting - Development in Sweden 1998-2008

Abstract

The Background of the thesis starts with the fact that environmental issues have grown progressively in the consciousness of the global community, which has turned its eyes to the corporate world and its impact on the environment. Various stakeholders have to an increasing extent requested the corporations to report on these issues, but since there have been no legislation or guidelines on the subject historically; there has been a vigorous debate on how and what to report. Much research and several studies have been made on the subject and worth to emphasize is that the largest corporations tend to lead the way in their respective industries and that Sweden seems to be one of the lagging countries when it comes to Environmental Sustainability Reporting. The Purpose of the thesis is to map out the development in Environmental Sustainability Reporting of the largest corporation in each industry in Sweden over the past eleven years in order to, if possible, identify trends and draw conclusions about the future. The Conceptual Framework of the study is composed of: A definition of Environmental Sustainability Reporting, legislation and recommendations concerning Environmental Sustainability Reporting, information on Sustainability Reporting in Sweden as of 2008, the Stakeholder Theory, the Theory of Legitimacy, information on the qualitative characteristics of accounting, and an introduction to the rhetorical notions of Ethos, Pathos and Logos. The Methodology of the thesis was of a quantitative approach. We obtained and, influenced by the GRI guidelines, assessed information reported in the Annual and Sustainability Reports of the chosen companies and years, translating the quality of the information into scoreboards later used to draw conclusions on. The main Restrictions were the number of corporations chosen to investigate and the number of years to examine. The nine companies chosen for the study were the largest ones in Sweden of each respective industry presented on the Stockholm OMX exchange and the years chosen to inquire into were the three years 1998, 2003 and 2008. In Conclusion, there has been a development towards a more detailed and concrete reporting, leading to an improved relevance. Simultaneously, reliability has improved caused by the progress of verifiability due to the increase of concrete reporting and an enhanced third party assurance, in tandem with an improved validity, albeit possibly biased. With this progress, comparability between companies can also be concluded to have improved; comparability over time will become better since the GRI guidelines have helped improve the quality in setting standards. In conclusion, there seems to be a continual increasing development towards meeting stakeholder requests.