Does GRI reporting impact environmental sustainability? A cross-industry analysis of CO<sub>2</sub> emissions performance between GRI-reporting and non-reporting companies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess whether Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting has any direct and positive impact on environmental sustainability performance, and more specifically on CO 2 emissions of the reporting companies. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyze the CO 2 emissions data from 40 A-level GRI-reporting companies, over a period of six years and across five industry sectors, comparing them with a control group of 24 non-reporting companies, to assess any direct impact of reporting on emissions. Using one-way analysis of variance statistical analysis, the authors perform a cross-industry analysis of the five-year cumulative change in absolute emissions and emissions intensity for both groups of companies from 2008 to 2012. Findings The authors find that for both metrics, the p -value between the two groups of companies far exceeds the threshold of 0.05, hence strongly favouring the “null hypothesis” that there is no correlation between GRI-reporting and sustainability improvement. More specifically, the authors find that the mean of the five-year cumulative change for the GRI group is an actual increase of about 6 percent in absolute emissions and a decrease of 15 percent emissions intensity, while the mean for non-GRI entities shows a decrease of about 3 percent and a decrease of 17 percent in absolute emissions and emission intensity, respectively. Research limitations/implications The authors are limited by the small sample of companies that have five or more years of reliable reporting of CO 2 emissions at Scopes 1 and 2. Nonetheless, a normality test shows that the sample size is sufficiently representative of the entire population. Practical implications The lack of any correlation between GRI reporting, which often consists of the lion share of corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment, and any material improvement in CO 2 performance, suggests that the current CSR strategies are futile as far as environmental sustainability is concerned, and hence need to be drastically modified. Originality/value This work is the first of its kind to investigate quantitatively, and using rigorous statistical methods, the correlation between GRI reporting and carbon emissions performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".