Environmental reporting practices evidence from indian commercial banks

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed increasing concern towards the environment due to the ravages inflicted on them by mankind. With the concept of sustainable development perpetually growing over the years, global institutions have been acknowledging their other duties towards the society, and have been integrating environmental practices into their strategic framework to significantly contribute to the sustainable bandwagon. However, since the financial crisis of newline2008, it has been found that banking institutions have become active participants in fostering environmental sustainability. Also, due to the increased awareness and pressure from the stakeholders, these institutions have been reporting their environmental initiatives and practices in their bank reports and websites. The extensive review of the literature reveals that there are hardly any studies that have been carried out in the Indian context, pertinently in the banking sector. Therefore, considering this as a major research gap, the present study aims to comprehensively evaluate the environmental reporting practices of selected commercial banks in India for the period from 2011 to 2022. newlineThis study follows an explorative and descriptive research design, with a deductive research approach. However, this research is based on secondary data, and adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Following the judgmental sampling technique, the sample of the study consists of thirty public and private commercial banks in India. The content analysis technique has been adopted to extract environmental information from bank reports and websites using the developed environmental reporting index. The independent sample t-test is newlineused to compare the environmental reporting performance of public and private-sector newlinecommercial banks. This study analyses the relationship between environmental reporting and bank-specific characteristics using the Pearson correlation coefficient analysis.