Cross‐sectional benchmarking of social and environmental reporting practice in the australian oil and gas industry

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to examine social and environmental disclosures against general and industry benchmarks for the quantity and quality of social and environmental reporting practice. To achieve this, a content analysis approach has been applied to disclosures of the 25 Australian oil and gas companies included in the Australian Stock Exchange 300 index in 2006. The conclusions are that there is relatively poor disclosure, and the majority of environmental disclosures are declarative and positive. Oil and gas companies sampled fail to provide detailed information about, for example, the quantification of targets and outputs, actual achievements and the level of participation by employees. However, consistent with previous studies, the companies perform relatively well in reporting human resources information. Implications of these findings and potential for future research are highlighted. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Sustainability Reporting Guidelines—safety Issues for Oil Companies

“…Also, multiple initiatives and rankings have been emerging at the national and regional levels. Empirical studies in the context of oil and gas companies acknowledge that they tend to provide a greater volume of disclosures than other industries as a means of mitigating their negative impacts on the environment and society (Dong and Burritt, 2010). The oil industry has an important role in the global sustainability reporting discussion.…”

“…Globally, oil companies are subject to more intensive environmental regulation, greater influence by stakeholder opinion (Wood and Ross, 2008), and are required to provide a higher percentage of verified environmental reports (Kolk et al, 2001) than companies working in many other industries. However, Dong and Burritt (2010) conclude that corporate disclosures by oil companies focus too much on common disclosures about employees and the environment: "relatively narrow focus … undermines the credibility of social and environmental disclosures for decision making by investors because specific relevant information is not provided" (Dong and Burritt, 2010, p. 116). Seeking to satisfy the needs of too many different stakeholders, companies may use various guidelines with indicators and recommendations.…”

Sustainability Assurance in Socially-Sensitive Sectors: A Worldwide Analysis of the Financial Services Industry

“…In fact, since 1978, we found dozens of articles about 'environmentally-sensitive sectors' (see, for example, [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]). Moreover, the pioneers issuing in the 1980s and early-90s Environmental Reports belonged to the petrochemical sector.…”

Reply to Dong et al., 2014, JCLEPRO, 84, 59–69

“…To measure disclosure in reports (dependent variable) DBQ combined several indices developed in previous articles (Clarkson et al, 2008;Dong and Burritt, 2010). Here, values are assigned indicating the types of information (from (0) no disclosure to (3) monetary disclosure), substance of information (from (0) no disclosure to (3) disclosed as performance and achievement), and performance indicators (from (0) no disclosure to (6) disclosed at disaggregated level).…”