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The Agenda 2030 have drawn a lot of interest in academic studies. This necessitates accounting research on nonfinancial reporting and sustainable development goals (SDG) disclosure in an under-investigated context. The purpose of this study is to examine the contribution of nonfinancial reporting practices to SDG disclosure by 120 companies from 12 African nations for the years 2016 to 2020.

The study uses a content analysis to gauge how much information are disclosed on SDG by the selected firms. The authors carried out content analysis using the global reporting initiative frameworks to determine the level of SDG disclosure across the companies by examining the selected nonfinancial reports.

Sustainability reports account for 50% of such SDG disclosure making it the highest. This is followed by corporate social responsibility report which accounts for 23%, while environmental reports account for 20% and Chairman’s statement accounts for 7%. The result is expected since corporate sustainability report has been the major channel for disclosing activities relating to social and governance issues in recent times.

The results of this study demand that corporate entities in Africa take responsibility for their actions and exert significant effort to achieve the SDG. While the government has the main responsibility, corporate entities must support the SDG to be realized.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the few studies that examines nonfinancial reporting practices with a focus on SDG disclosure. In addition, this study offers novel insight into how accounting research contributes to nonfinancial reporting practices and SDG disclosure.

This paper aims to contribute to the development of the European Union (EU) regulatory environment for sustainability reporting by analyzing how materiality is defined in the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and by examining the added value and challenges of legalizing reporting and materiality requirements from both regulatory and practical company perspectives. It provides insights on whether this is reflected by EU pharmaceutical companies and to what extent companies report information on their materiality analysis process.

Doctrinal analysis was used to examine regulatory instruments. Qualitative document analysis was used to analyze companies’ reports. The added value and challenges were examined using a governance approach. It focused on legalizing reporting and materiality requirements, with a brief extension to corporate management and organization studies.

Materiality has evolved from a vague concept in the NFRD toward double materiality in the CSRD. This was reflected by the industry, but reports revealed inconsistencies in materiality definitions and reported information. Challenges include lack of self-reflection and company-centric perceptions of materiality. Companies should explain how they identify relevant stakeholders and how input is considered in decision-making.

Managers must consider how they conduct materiality assessments to meet society’s expectations. The underlying processes should be explained to increase the credibility of reports. Sustainability reporting should be seen as a corporate governance tool.

This work contributes to the literature on materiality in sustainability reporting and to the debate on the need for a holistic, society-centric approach to enhance the sustainability of companies.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to establish the sustainability reporting practices of FTSE 100 companies using integrated reporting (IR), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance (CG) as proxies. Our study has adopted a holistic approach by combining dimensions of each factor in one variable.

Design/Methodological Approach: The study data cover all FTSE 100 companies over five years, thereby generating 505 company-year observations for each variable of the study. Authors have collected the data from Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reports filed with Thomson Reuters and International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC).

Findings: Results indicate the practice of sustainability reporting in FTSE 100 companies both per variables and dimensions levels. It shows, for example, 89% of the companies reported on their charitable donations. The study also found that 79% of the FTSE 100 companies reported on their sustainability committees whilst 86% and 85% reported on their emission reduction and waste reduction policies, respectively. Results show that the CSR impact is higher than CG regarding IR adoption. The Logistic Model manages to explain a high percentage of IR adoption while controlling for other misspecification issues such as multicollinearity.

Practical Implication: The study highlights practice of substantiality reporting for public shareholding companies listed on FTSE 100 Index along with interaction among proxies. These will be of interest to companies not only in the FTSE 100 Index but also those outside. Companies can rely on these factors to strengthen their governance, social responsibility and reporting policies in consideration of all stakeholders and not just a few. We believe that we shed a quantitative explanation on IR adoption by CSR and CG factors, and we expect an impact on practices following results of our study.

Social Implication: Results have indicated that at least 60% of companies in the FTSE 100 Index have imbedded social responsibility activities, such as charitable giving, waste reduction initiatives, emissions reduction policy and sustainability committees.

Considering the dearth of industry-specific empirical research exploring sustainability reporting in the context of developing countries, this chapter aims to critically examine the extent and the nature of sustainability information disclosure of environmentally polluting industries in India.

Data are collected from business responsibility reports (BRRs), sustainability reports, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports and integrated reports of all 57 energy and mining companies included in NIFTY500 Index at National Stock Exchange of India for the year 2017–2018 and 2018–2019. Content analysis is used to examine the sustainability disclosure practices and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistical analysis is performed to test the difference across various dimensions of sustainability reporting of companies.

The results indicate low environmental reporting of the key indicators by energy and mining companies in India. It is found that state-owned companies have better social reporting practices against private sector companies. The findings also indicate that Global reporting initiative (GRI) based reporting have better sustainability disclosure practices and companies reporting based on BRR lack quantitative information disclosure.

The findings of the present chapter have several implications for policymakers, investors, regulators and management of these high environmental and social impact companies in India. The findings which coincide with the key areas of sustainability disclosure can be used for improving sustainability disclosure practices by the various stakeholders.

This is one of the first studies to investigate the nature and extent of sustainability performance disclosure of the companies from polluting industries in India. This chapter also contributes to the existing sustainability reporting literature by providing evidence on industry-specific disclosure in the context of a developing country.

In 2014, the European Union (EU) adopted the non-financial reporting Directive (2014/95/EU) making the disclosure of certain non-financial topics mandatory for large listed companies. They are required to report on policies, actions and outcomes regarding their environmental impact, social and employee matters, impact on human rights and corruption. Denmark introduced mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting already in 2009, while Germany had no specific legislation on CSR reporting before 2017. Some authors allege that regulation positively impacts CSR reporting, while others argue that the voluntary nature of CSR reporting is essential (Romolini, Fissi, & Gori, 2014). Critics of mandatory reporting claim that non-financial reporting should develop bottom-up, as mandatory one-size-fits-all solutions are inappropriate given the differences among companies (ICC, 2015). The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the effect of legislation on reporting quality by comparing Denmark with a long tradition for mandatory reporting and Germany introducing mandatory rather recently. However, a rich body of literature exists on factors impacting CSR reporting other than legislation. These are among others: firm size, ownership structure, industrial sector and culture (Hahn & Kühnen, 2013.)

The chapter applies a content analysis of 150 CSR reports from German and Danish listed companies between 2008 and 2017 from four different industrial sectors. The chapter finds that mandatory reporting improves overall report quality by lifting the quality floor, yet, without lifting the quality ceiling. Size is important as improvements in reporting are largest in small and medium-sized companies. Companies in environmentally sensitive sectors tend to disclose more relevant environmental information than companies in less sensitive sectors. Both culture and ownership structure has a moderating effect on report quality.

The research objectives of this chapter are threefold. First, we explore what is the current status of corporate water accounting tools and methodologies. Second, we develop a framework for analyzing corporate water accounting and reporting. Third, we investigate what French CAC 40 companies account for and report in relations to the water challenge.

We collected annual and sustainability reports from all CAC 40 companies as well as their water Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) responses when available. We also collected all publically available corporate water accounting methodologies to assess the international water accounting field. We coded the data according to our designed framework via qualitative data analysis software.

Although water is seen as equally important to climate change (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), 2009), French multinationals have a very immature reporting on this topic. Most still do not report to the water disclosure questionnaire of CDP in 2014 and rely on basic figures such as global water consumption. We analyzed the multiple water accounting, reporting, and risk assessment frameworks that have mushroomed since 2000, and question the impact of this fragmented field on the maturity of the water performance reporting by French companies.

The developed framework for analysis of water reporting can be used for sustainability teaching at university level.

We developed the first comprehensive analytical framework for water corporate reporting assessment. Moreover, this research is the first comprehensive study of water reporting in Europe. We therefore contribute to extend our comprehension of corporate maturity in water stewardship and water performance reporting.

The main objective of this study is to investigate whether adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) improve the quality of financial reporting in Nigeria. Financial reporting quality was measured in terms of fundamental qualitative characteristics such as relevance and faithful representation and enhancing qualitative characteristics such as understandability, comparability, verifiability, and timeliness as contained in the conceptual framework. The study was conducted on a sample of 162 companies listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. A compound measurement tool in form of an index was developed to comprehensively assess the quality of financial reporting based on information disclosed in the financial statement of the selected companies. From both univariate and multivariate analysis, I found strong evidence suggesting that accounting standard used in the preparation of financial statement have significant influence on the quality of financial report of the reporting entity. The result persists for all the three models (overall financial reporting quality, fundamental, and enhancing qualitative characteristics) tested in this analysis. The result also revealed that apart from firm age and firm growth, most of the firm-specific variables investigated have statistically significant influence on the financial reporting quality.

This chapter explores the adaptation and evolution of stand-alone CSR reporting in two different political economies and late-capitalist countries: Brazil and South Korea. Instead of selecting between new institutionalism and the varieties of capitalism (VOC) approach, this study attempts to explore how the interaction between converging and diverging pressures appears in the adaptation and evolution of stand-alone CSR reporting (i.e., cross-fertilization process) in two countries.

Using qualitative content analysis this study focuses on the frameworks of CSR reports and the way CSR issues are described within the stand-alone CSR reports of four telecommunication companies in Brazil and South Korea.

Even though CSR reports in both countries have become similar due to the convergence of frameworks of CSR reporting, the key themes and the representation on each theme are still embedded within each form of market economy: a hierarchical market economy (HME) in Brazil and a network market economy (NME) in South Korea. From a cross-fertilization perspective, this chapter shows that the adaptation and evolution of CSR reporting occurs at two different levels of CSR reporting.

This study has three major values. First, it explains the two different levels of the adaptation and evolution process of CSR reporting by bringing a dynamic cross-fertilization view. Second, it provides a qualitative study that focuses on the content of CSR disclosures instead of the quantity of those disclosures. Lastly, it contributes to the academic and practical research on CSR in late-capitalist countries and in two under-researched types of political economies.

This study establishes a baseline evaluation of sustainability reporting (SR) and integrated reporting (IR) practices among groups of companies globally using a combined evaluation matrix. We evaluate a sample of high performance companies (HPC), global reporting initiative (GRI) companies, international integrated reporting committee (IIRC) companies, and a control group of companies that do not belong to any of these groups. We test for high performance and compliance with a 30-point evaluation matrix for financial reporting, corporate governance, integrated disclosure, SR, and assurance developed from the standards set by GRI and IIRC. This chapter provides evidence as to the current IR and SR states, and shows that considerable variation exists even among companies that have pledged to improve reporting in this arena. The analysis also shows that companies that belong to no special group do in fact score on a level that shows that SR and IR standards are being implemented by many companies in the world, not just those in special groups like the HPC, GRI, and IIRC. Finally, this study provides direction for global regulators and professional associations, and to the management of companies that aspire to HPC status while meeting the IR and SR standards.

Previous research has revealed industry differences in respect of environmental reporting in South Africa. However, these studies concentrated on particular types of environmental reporting and therefore precluded many other types of environmental reporting in the annual reports surveyed. Past surveys also awarded equal credit to any reference to a particular type of environmental information, whether it comprised a single sentence or several pages. The annual reports of the top 100 companies, in terms of market capitalisation, were analysed and a sentence count of environmental disclosure was done with the use of the Hackston & Milne (1996) methodology. The group of energy companies was defined as comprising companies in energy‐intensive industries or companies that are producers of energy carriers. The survey revealed that these companies disclosed significantly more environmental information than other companies, in total and in each category These findings are consistent with the notion of legitimacy, which holds that companies cannot prosper if their aims and methods are not perceived to be in line with that of society. For this reason, companies that have the most obvious environmental impact tend to disclose more environmental information than other companies in an effort to legitimise their aims and methods in the eyes of society.