Level of Disclosure of Environmental Information in the Electricity Sector: An Empirical Study of Brazil and the Iberian Peninsula
Electricity markets currently face shared global challenges in the search for sustainable energy: security of energy supply, protection of the environment and maintenance of competitiveness. Together these three factors help produce cleaner and more compatible energy with sustainable development. One way of assessing the environmental performance and disclosure level of a company is the use of metrics. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators are the most accepted ones in previously published literature. In the first decade of this century there was an increase in social and environmental disclosure in the electricity sector in Brazil, following trends set elsewhere in the world. The stakeholders’ request for both environmental information and accountability resulted in the dissemination of sustainability reports, especially in the more environmentally sensitive industries. During the privatization of the Brazilian electricity sector, some of Iberia’s largest energy firms began to invest more in Brazil as a result of the European liberalization process that was already under way. This paper aims to identify the Environmental Information Disclosure Level (EIDL) of Brazilian companies and Iberian companies, which published sustainability reports using the GRI indicators. The main conclusions show that Brazilian companies are in the process of improving their disclosure level while Iberian companies have remained constant at a higher level. An analysis of the level of disclosure of different firms and their different locations suggests that Iberian companies have better performance than their Brazilian counterparts when it comes to environmental issues.
