Sustainability Accounting Reporting: A Survey on 30 U.S. Dow-Jones Companies

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to examine the development of sustainability accounting and reporting in practice, and to observe the reporting patterns and standards followed through a survey on reporting frameworks of U.S. large companies (Dow-Jones 30 companies). This paper first reviews and summarizes the recent literature in sustainability accounting research, particularly in sustainability accounting reporting. Further, the paper provides a survey on sustainability accounting reportingframe works of 30 U.S. Dow-Jones companies. The findings of this study confirm the increasing trend of sustainability reporting among large publicly traded firms, which is suggested by prior accounting research.However, we observevarious reporting formats and patterns among these 30 Dow-Jones companies.Thisimplies that the lack of uniformity of sustainability reporting and assurance might reduce the comparability, effectiveness and accuracy of sustainability accounting reporting.