Sustainability Disclosure in Renewable Energy Sector: Evaluating the Scoring Framework

Abstract: The United Nations 2030 agenda for sustainable development (United Nations, 2016) proposes 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 integrated and indivisible targets. They balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. Sustainability reporting has been the novel corporate inclination toward ensuring the capability of an enterprise in fulfilling sustainability criteria. The Sustainability reports, on the contrary, prevalently emphasize the positives. Besides this, there is minimal benchmarking, and only descriptive results are published. This research paper is an attempt to address this ambiguity. Sustainability report of a leading Renewable Energy company in India is analyzed using SBSC scoring framework put forward by Nicolaou (2013). The purpose of this study is to evaluate how well this SBSC Scale gauges the sustainability performance of companies in the clean energy sector. Findings state that, while sustainability reports do claim to monitor sustainability performance, this is not what they actually do. Moreover, the existing SBSC framework comprises of gaps that need to be addressed. Keywords: Renewable Energy Company, SBSC Scoring, Sustainable Developmen