engleski

WHAT ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION DO CROATIAN ENTERPRISES DISCLOSE IN THEIR NON-FINANCIAL REPORTS, AND WHICH ITEMS ARE MISSING?

Doing business nowadays is strongly connected with thinking about the environment and how enterprises’ activities affect it. Stakeholders are sensitive to this subject, so enterprises must act in a way that has no or minimal impact on the environment. Enterprises should think about the reduction of environmental risk their production, services or business models can have on the environment. Being innovative and creative is important for enterprises that want to be recognized as sustainable and ready to think and act in a way that is improving life quality of present and future generations. Some of the guidance also comes from the European Commission and one of the newly introduced initiatives called the European Green Deal. Its action plan provides guidance on how to boost efficient use of resources by moving to a clean, circular economy, restore biodiversity and cut pollution which will raise the quality of life. So, thinking about entrepreneurial ecosystem which is being more and more green-oriented and the stakeholder theory that has become an important theoretical basis for explaining and questioning the role of business in society is leading to a question about the importance of non-financial reporting. For writing a non-financial report, an enterprise can use different frameworks that provide guidelines on what and how to report. The Global Reporting Standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) are commonly in use and call for a disclosure of economic, social, and environmental information. There are 32 environmental disclosures in 8 categories named GRI 300. According to that, the aim of this paper is to analyse which of these disclosures are mostly represented in enterprises’ non-financial reports. Moreover, the authors also analysed the disclosures not included in non-financial reports. The research was conducted on a sample comprising Croatian enterprises that had prepared at least one non-financial report using the GRI Standard for 2018 or 2019. The content analysis of non-financial reports from 20 Croatian companies was conducted in order to collect data for purposes of research. The main conclusion that can be made based on the research is that reporting on environmental issues of Croatian companies is limited since a low number of GRI environmental disclosures are reported by companies. So, if Croatia wants to boost non-financial reporting among enterprises, it should think about promoting environmental questions and the responsibility that enterprises have while doing business. Moreover, in this paper authors provided more information about the state of environmental reporting in a small, transitional country of Croatia.

environmental reporting, Global Reporting Initiative, eco–responsible enterprises, Croatia

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