The disclosure of industrial greenhouse gas emissions: a critical assessment of corporate sustainability reports

The European body of research on corporate environmental performance has not yet reached maturity. That is mainly due to the limited access researchers have to raw environmental performance data, in conjunction with an often sterile approach to developing proxies and indicators for this type of corporate performance. Moreover, annual sustainability reports are often neglected in spite of their capacity to produce a compelling longitudinal research perspective. The present article offers a critical reading of the last decade's sustainability reports from the top five largest European oil and gas companies. On account of their significant contribution to global warming, the sample companies (i.e. BP, Total, Shell, BG Group and Eni) have been scrutinized for their ability to provide high-quality environmental disclosures at group-level. Given the sophistication of emissions data collection and estimation tools such as the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, it comes as a surprise that these five industry leaders have issued reports containing unexplained figures and methodological inconsistencies. Finally, the reader is persuaded that empirical research in the field of corporate environmental performance should mostly be about creating a context for discussing a firm's commitment to sustainability, rather than modelling irrelevant cross-sectional data to find similarities between incomparable cases. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.