Corporate sustainability reporting : study of the pulp and paper companies in Finland and the USA

Abstract

Public awareness is increasing on how the environment is changing and impacting everyone’s life. The growing demand for transparency of business operation and accountability towards the environment and society are motivating the firms to prioritize the long-term or sustainable goals in their business model. Contemporarily, companies are spending more time on developing corporate sustainability strategies, implementing, and reporting them. This thesis analyses leading global pulp and paper companies’ CS reporting practices within two countries: Finland, and the USA. It is based on qualitative research focusing on the past annual reports and sustainability relevant documents published to their shareholders and stakeholders from companies’ websites between 2010-2019. The content analysis is implemented in this research to analyze the data. The set of popular environmental and social sustainability keywords are searched in the reports and utilized as the source of data. The finding shows that the sustainability reporting practices were different among pulp and paper companies in Finland and the USA. In Finland, the results from case companies have fewer differences in the keyword coverage. At the beginning of the analysis period, there were notable differences in reporting between the American companies. Gradually, with the development in regulated global reporting standards and frameworks, the differences are leveling out and all the case companies in both countries are following similar CS reporting practices in later years.