Climate Change Disclosures in Different Cultures: A Study of Sustainability Reports

Abstract

Climate change threatens ecosystems and human health. For that reason, responding to climate change and addressing its impacts is essential to the future of risk management for companies. Recent studies have shown that companies increasingly recognize and report environmental issues. Reporting practices vary across countries and regions due to different cultural norms or regulations. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2001) have been widely used in disclosure researches. When focusing on particular types of disclosures, such as climate change disclosures, the interaction between the level of disclosure and Hofstede’s cultural values should be evaluated in a specific context. The main purpose of this chapter is to investigate climate change disclosures used in sustainability reports and to analyze climate change disclosures in different nations. Content analysis was applied to six companies’ sustainability reports from six nations, namely, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and Turkey. The sustainability reports of the companies were gathered from GRI Database, and examined for national culture, individualism (IND), power distance (PD), uncertainty avoidance (UA), masculinity (MAS); the measures used were based on Hofstede’s dimensions. Comparisons of climate change disclosures in sustainability reports show that the disclosure of climate change differs according to national culture scores.