Voluntary Sustainability and Environmental Reporting

Running head: ACCOUNTING FINANCIAL THEORY REPORT
Accounting Financial Theory Report
Name of the Student
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Author’s Note

1ACCOUNTING FINANCIAL THEORY REPORT
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Explanation of CDP.........................................................................................................................2
Integrated Reporting vs. GRI Sustainability Reporting...................................................................4
References........................................................................................................................................6

2ACCOUNTING FINANCIAL THEORY REPORT
Introduction
Voluntary sustainability and environmental reporting has become a crucial success factor
for the companies all over the world due to the increase in certain environmental issues like
change in climate and others (Steyn 2014). It puts the obligation on the listed companies to under
any mechanism of voluntary reporting for the disclosure of non-financial information on
different sustainability, environmental and governance aspects. Companies can select the
appropriate voluntary reporting framework based on their sustainability needs (Matisoff, Noonan
and O'Brien 2013). Some of the widely used voluntary reporting frameworks all over the world
are Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Sustainability Reporting by the Global Reporting
Initiatives, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and others. For the purpose of
this report, CDP is taken into consideration for addressing the disclosure limitation related to
environmental aspects. The second part shows the conceptual differences between GRI
sustainability reporting and Integrated Reporting (IR).
Explanation of CDP
CDP is a not-for-profit charity that the environmental stakeholders and invested launched
in the year of 2000. It works with the companies, investors, cities, states and regions for
managing the environmental impacts by improving environmental data disclosure (cdp.net
2019). Three main working areas of CDP are Climate, Water and Forests. The framework of
CDP takes into consideration the effects of climate change along with carbon disclosure. The
vision of CDP is to develop a thriving economy that works people and planer for long-term. In
order to achieve this, this framework focuses on the investors, companies and cities in order to
take urgent action for building a truly sustainable economy through measuring as well as