The impact of the European Directive 2014/95/EU on the energy companies’ disclosures

Abstract

Even though the sustainability reporting is voluntary, companies are increasingly adopting it. There is a multitude of reporting standards used by companies in this regard. Along with the voluntary guidelines, in 2014 was adopted a European Directive which became mandatory for a set of companies. Our research question is which are the changes brought in the reporting of the European companies by the Directive? In doing this, we focus on the energy companies. We selected them because they are environmentally-sensitive. We selected the European energy companies which included a report for last year in the GRI’s database. We downloaded the reports published by the sample companies in the period 2014 – 2017. We selected 2014 as a starting point because it is the year in which the Directive was approved. We selected 2017 because it was the first year in which the ED 2014/95/EU became mandatory. First of all, we extracted the words used in the Directive for writing the names of the indicators. Using NVivo Pro, we searched for the indicators in the selected reports. By analyzing the core indicators for the energy domain, we pursued to identify the sample companies’ commitment to sustainability. The contribution of our study is that it provides an insight into the Directive as a driver which influences the sustainability reporting.