Environmental responsibility disclosure of publicly listed companies in Finland

Environmental challenges such as climate change have increased environmental awareness of the public around the world. This has resulted in increasing societal demand for environmental sustainability of commercial organizations and in increased policy pressure for environmental regulation. Many of the regulation programs are addressing corporations’ disclosure of environmental information. Different company stakeholders such as investors, employees and customers are increasingly demanding social and environmental sustainability and transparency. Also, environmental sustainability has great economic potential for companies. The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the extent of environmental responsibility disclosure of publicly listed companies on Helsinki Stock Exchange. Thus, the aim was to increase understanding on how extensively the companies included in the research are communicating on the effects that their operations are causing to the environment and to compare the results with different company characteristics which in this research were the companies’ industry, size, profitability, board size and share of women on the board of directors. There are total of 129 companies listed in the Helsinki Stock Exchange of which 53 companies released the GRI report in 2017. Thus, 41% of the companies listed in Helsinki Stock Exchange are included in the study. To evaluate and quantify the environmental responsibility disclosure transparency, a disclosure index was created for each company by examining the share of disclosed GRI indices. The theoretical framework is based on earlier research on corporate social responsibility and corporate environmental sustainability. Hypotheses of the study were developed with the help of the utilized theories. The hypotheses which were concerning the relationship between the extent of environmental disclosure and different company characteristics were evaluated by utilizing correlation analysis and regression analysis. The findings suggest that Finnish publicly listed companies are disclosing relatively little amount of information on their environmental sustainability and performance. Of the five hypotheses one was accepted. The company characteristic which positively affected the level of environmental disclosure was company size. The main contribution of this thesis to the existing knowledge is that it elicits information on the subject in the Finnish context and with multiple different industries. The results can be used to compare environmental reporting of commercial organizations between different countries