Corporate Environmental Reporting: Approaches And Challenges

Sustainable development issue have become increasingly important to a range of stakeholders and attention has focused on the environmental impacts of corporate activities. Within this context, investors and other stakeholders demand for reliable and accurate information regarding environmental performance. Thus sustainable or environmental reporting has arisen as a challenging and attractive growth area for accounting professionals (Bell and Lehman 1999). One of the most challenging issue in environmental reporting is how and what corporations should report to meet demands of various stakeholders. Reporting about environmental issues may embrace information both in traditional financial reports and in any other reports. For environmental reporting, guidelines have been published by various parties since the beginning of the nineties (IIIEE Report 2002). Considerable debate has taken place among the international bodies on the recognition, classification and quantification of environmentally significant information. A number of recommendations were put forward in the 1990s by standardization and Professional bodies. Yet, there are considerable contradictions among these recommendations leaving management a large element of discretion when deciding which issues to recognize, how to measure these and what to disclose about environmental activities (Schalteger and Burrit 2000). The aim of this study is to present approaches and guidelines of corporate environmental reporting (CER) in an international context. For this purpose development of CER is presented which is then followed by approaches to environmental reporting such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting framework, initiatives of Standard setters and some governmental regulations. Keywords: Corporate Environmental Reporting, Sustainable Accounting, Sustainable Reporting, Environmental Reporting Guidelines