Carbon Emissions by South American Companies: Driving Factors for Reporting Decisions and Emissions Reduction

Abstract

In the last decade, companies have started to disclose information on carbon emissions. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to look into this phenomenon in South America, which is a very important geographical area regarding climate change because of the local nature and developing economies. This paper explores the relationships between some corporate variables and two important decisions: (i) whether to report carbon emissions, and (ii) the impact on the evolution of carbon emissions. Logit and linear panel data models are used to determine the driving factors for decisions (i) and (ii). Our results show that regarding the carbon reporting decision, a company's size, sustainability reporting, existence of a sustainability committee, and whether it belongs to a certain sector (telecom, utilities, and consumer discretionary) are significant positive factors, whereas the country is a negatively significant factor if the company is based in either Chile or Peru. Regarding the factors that lead to more sustainable behavior, our results reveal that a company's size, the existence of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee, and the disclosure of a sustainability report lead to a decrease in emissions levels.

The impact of corporate social responsibility transparency on the financial performance, brand value, and sustainability level of IT companies

“…These economic–financial and corporate variables have been used as control variables in research works conducted to analyse the performance of sustainability reports (Córdova, Zorio‐Grima, & Merello, ; Sierra‐García, García‐Benau, & Zorio, ; Zorio‐Grima, García‐Benau, & Sierra‐García, ).…”

Carbon Information Disclosure Practice in Indonesia: A Comprehensive Study from Manufacturing and Mining Industry

“…The companies that perform publications about their CSR activity, has a CSR committee, and doing the audit process on the CSR report or sustainability report will be given a value of 1, and if it does not have to be given a value of 0. The measurement of corporate sustainability profile variable is based on previous research which used a variable of corporate sustainability profile in research on carbon emission disclosure on companies in South America [13]. The company's size variable was measured based on the company's total assets.…”

“…The company's sustainability profile is a factor which derived from the internal sources that can improve the company's management commitment to disclose carbon emissions information. Previous research explained that the company's sustainability profile can be seen from the company's management report, CSR report, which is separate from the company's financial statements, the CSR committee or the environment committee on the organizational structure of the company, and the audit process for the CSR report or the sustainability report of the company [13]. Based on the concept of good corporate governance, management should practice good governance, in particular also concerns the business practices of companies that deal with environmental issues.…”

Analysing the environmental websites of the world’s greatest polluters: a multimodal ecolinguistic approach

“…A number of factors have been found to influence a company's readiness to be publicly engaged with climate change. Among them, size (C ordova et al, 2018;Eleftheriadis & Anagnostopoulou, 2015;Nartey, 2018;S anchez-Infante Hern andez et al, 2020), internal organisation systems (C ordova et al, 2018;Nartey, 2018;Rankin et al, 2011), international presence (Halkos & Skouloudis, 2016), the sector in which the companies operate (Weder et al, 2019), and external pressure (Haque & Islam, 2015;Littlewood et al, 2018), including media exposure (Wang et al, 2013) and extraordinary natural disasters (Pollach, 2018). Research also suggests that those companies and countries which implement environmental issues in their everyday practices, through patents or industrial and economic activity, tend to be more successful in terms of competitive advantages, economic growth and innovation (Ferreira et al, 2020;Mohammadi et al, 2018;Singh et al, 2019;Skare & Golja, 2012).…”