Global Environmental Website Disclosure of Large Production Companies and their CDP Scores

Abstract

This work contributes to the exposure of the current state of environmental disclosure through an empirical transnational study of 344 websites of large production companies from China, Europe, Japan, and the USA. The focus of the investigation is on four formative indices based on variables covering observation of disclosure extent of environmental management and environmental compliance management. All countries show low levels of disclosure. However, some variation on the extent of disclosure was found. The lowest level of disclosure was found for the Chinese websites. Higher - though not remarkable higher - levels of disclosure extents were observed for the companies from Europe, Japan, and the USA. Also, the correlation between disclosure scores based on these observational data and the CDP carbon disclosure scores of the year 2020 did only reveal insignificant correlations. However, websites having webpages containing a higher number of terms of the corporate environmental management terminology also achieve higher CDP scores.