Environmental photograph use in corporate sustainability reporting: A machine-supported visual content analysis

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of photographs in corporate sustainability reporting, their use is not yet sufficiently understood. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first large-scale study in the field. Introducing a novel machine-supported approach, we assess environmental photograph utilization based on a sample of 45,228 photographs contained in 1,463 separately disclosed sustainability reports from European firms between 2011 and 2020. We find that against the overall trend of decreasing photograph utilization, the share of environmentally themed photographs has markedly increased. Furthermore, operating in an environmentally sensitive industry is strongly associated with a substantially larger share of photographs depicting environmental subject matter. Lastly, we observe that companies signal their superior environmental performance through greater utilization of environmental photographs. By introducing a novel machine-supported approach to analyzing photographs, this study makes a methodological contribution to the field of sustainability reporting. Our results also have important practical implications.