Introduction
Our involvement on the environment is considerably becoming more significant in all walks of life, including business. According to the nature of business it utilizes resources, pollute the environment and produce waste products. This is why business attracts substantial attention from individuals and groups of environmentalists who are more concerned about the prospect natural environment.
Therefore, most worldwide companies are working on strategic agendas to address the issue of environmental sustainability, hence making sustainability reporting a global issue which requires an immediate attention (Standards Australia, 2003: 27)
Definition
Environmental reporting is referred to as a conscious communication and social responsibility that aims at improving dynamic and voluntary exposure of environmental information. It aims at revealing what an organization is planning to do on regards to environment within and surrounding its publics.
Additionally, the main function of this report is to give an important means for environmental communication and realize organizations’ accountability in consideration to environmental burdens. It is therefore considered important whenever writing this report to include its main intention to ensure that your intent fits with the global one and this progressively advance the substance of environmental reporting.
Environmental reporting also should include pledge, which affirms the determination to venture to accomplishing the environmental policies and objectives. It is good to note that a general environmental reporting is published once in every financial year ( DRPA, 2002: 36).
Roles of Environmental Reporting
This reporting has two principle roles namely; internal (corporate) and external (social) roles which support environmental efforts in organizations’ activities. It plays a significant task in strengthening charitable environmental works in specific organizations’ activities. Although we argue that the companies are not responsible for the environmental impacts, I believe that industries and factories if not well regulated by the environment management groups and activists they can cause a great harm to our nature.
Therefore it is important for the organizations to consider their external role that are characterized into three external responsibilities as long as environmental reporting is used as a link between the company and its publics. To start with is function to reveal information associated with company’s social accountability, to give information that is helpful for assessment to the stakeholders and finally to sponsor environmental activities between company’s and the citizens.
More so the company has two important internal roles; that is function to generate or amend environmental policies, goals and plans of an organization and secondly, function to encourage and motivate the management and workers and promote their environmental activities (Thaler and Sherwin, 2004:56-57)
Principles of Environmental Reporting
In order for an organization to meet its effective environmental report and to achieve its objectives, its basically good to consider the five-set principles which are entirely used to evaluate whether the reports meet its purpose of acting as communication medium between the organization and its public as satisfying social accountability function. These principles include;
Relevance: – Every organization is expected to act on the report which seeks to address issues that are helpful to the interested stakeholder’s decision making by reporting on the status of the environmental challenges caused by commerce activities. Every company should ensure that its activities are well controlled to fit the maximum environmental requirements the report should include only the expectations of the target audience on relation to environmental reporting (Porter and Claas, 2005: 69)
Reliability of an Environmental reporting must be focused to the accuracy and factual aspects for if poorly presented it can harm the company’s reputation hence affecting its performance. The external image of any given company is highly dependant with what gets out of the organization to the user and this can highly influence decision making of opinion makers. Always try not to be bias in presentation.
The third principle of environmental reporting addresses clarity and in any given organization clarification is never taken for granted. The company needs to provide simple, easy to understand information to shun any form of misrepresentation to the stakeholders. It is good to always include the environmental impacts that your company has and indicates the remedies you undertake to minimize them.
Comparability
Its good to realize that a company does not operate in a noble world, but it has competitors in its field, therefore, its good to give comparable statements for all the reports addresses the same particular subject ‘environment’. First of all, you should include comparison of multiple years and provides historical tendency of the organization. Additionally, it’s good to provide clear positive motive of your company compared to the others that lies in the same sector. (Segerson and Miceli, 2008: 367)
Finally, an organization has to consider verifiability of the information and should also have to be with verifiable objective perspectives. An organization has to present estimation methods and boundaries of every part of information given and calculation formulas has to be explained to allow data confirmation and reliability of the third party.
Conclusion
Although environmental conservation organization has stipulated certain guidelines to guide environmental conservation process, personally I believe that the conservation is more over a norm than a rule. Every organization should use its own set principles to lay foundations on what they expect on their surroundings and put inconsideration the need of the public.
It should be an individual urge to everyone to make sure that he makes a good living condition without forgetting the era that we are living in of global warming and other environmental mayhems. Let’s take responsibility and preserve our environment for a healthier nation and world in general.
References
DRPA, 2000, Limited Environmental Site Assessment Report, Twin Lakes Opportunity Areas. MN, DPRA.
Porter, E. and Claas, L. 2005, “Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship”, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Segerson, K. and Thomas Miceli. 2008, “Voluntary Environmental Agreements: Good or Bad News for Environmental Protection?” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol 36, No. 2, pp. 109-130.
Standards Australia, 2003, Australian Standard AS3743-2003: Potting Mixes. Sydney: Standards Australia.
Thaler, R. and Sherwin, R. 2004, The Value of Life Savings, in Nester Terleckyj, ed., Household Production and Consumption. New York: Columbia University Press.