A relação entre o desempenho e a informação ambiental de empresas brasileiras participantes da GRI Sustainability Disclosure Database

• Autor(a) principal: Barbosa, Samylla Gabryella Sales
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFPB
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufpb.br/jspui/handle/123456789/20322
• topic: Contabilidade ambiental; Desempenho ambiental; GRI G4; Teoria da Legitimidade; Environmental accounting; Environmental performance; Theory of legitimacy; CNPQ::CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::ADMINISTRACAO::CIENCIAS CONTABEIS

In the last few decades, there has been an effort from multiple areas for issues on the environment to gain the space and visibility that their urgency demands. Within companies, this resulted in the need to change the status quo, they now need to adapt to changing processes and accountability for their environmental impacts through sustainability reports. Due to the heterogeneous nature of environmental information, the GRI guidelines were developed in order to help companies and governments to understand and disclose their environmental, social and economic performance. Cho and Patten (2007) affirm that the disclosure about sustainability is a tool used to legitimize organizational actions, however, due to its nonmandatory characteristic, both in the disclosure and in the auditing of the information disclosed, the reports can also become a way to creating a suitable image. In order to bring greater understanding on the theme, the following research question emanates: How are the environmental information published in the sustainability reports and the environmental performance of the companies contained in the GRI Sustainability Disclosure Database (GRI SDD) related? Furthermore, to meet the general objective, the following specific objectives were defined: Extract information on environmental performance and its disclosures based on the GRI G4 guidelines; Analyze whether the information released by managers follows and the compliance of this information with the guidelines defined by the GRI G4, to generate a ranking of compliance with the GRI G4; Analyze disclosures about energy consumption, water consumption, total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, total waste generated, total recycled, recovered or reused waste and investments and expenses in environmental protection, to generate environmental performance rankings for each mentioned category; Generate an environmental performance score that has as a proxy the average of the weighted performances of the aforementioned rankings; Check which associations exist between environmental performance and the different levels of managers' adherence to the GRI G4 guidelines. In this sense, the present study is classified as to the purposes as descriptive and explanatory, as to the means as documentary and makes use of the quantitative approach. Thus, through the content analysis technique, data on environmental performance and compliance with the GRI were collected in the sustainability reports and these were related through the non-parametric Mann- Whitney or Kruskal-Wallis tests. The population selected to carry out the research comprises all Brazilian companies that made their sustainability reports available in the GRI G4 model in the GRI SDD. In total, 131 companies and 286 reports were analyzed. It is worth mentioning that the present research is justified, mainly, because it is believed that the disclosure of information on aspects that touch the environment has a direct influence on environmental management, as it undergoes a continuous assessment process through the analysis of environmental performance, allowing to identify and measure the performance achieved for each of the managed criteria. On average, adherence to the GRI G4 guidelines was 38.42% and was greater by companies that are more harmful to the environment. Regarding environmental performance, it was noted that in general companies have an average performance of 0.5 (where the closer to 1, better) and there are also significant differences between polluting and nonpolluting companies, the environmental performance of non-polluting companies is greater. Finally, when relating adherence to environmental performance, it was found that the companies in the present study, with worse environmental performance, are more adherent to the GRI G4 guidelines than the other companies in the study, and produce more completesustainability reports, with more educational information for the parties interested in knowing their actions, what goes according to what was predicted by the theory of legitimacy.