Scoring corporate environmental reports for comprehensiveness: a comparison of three systems

Corporate annual environmental reports can be judged by the comprehensiveness of their coverage; this paper uses three published comprehensiveness scoring systems to judge 28 such reports (mostly dated 1998) from large US corporations. Earlier (nominally 1996) reports from the same companies were previously scored using one or two of the same systems, and the published results are compared with scores from the current round of reports. The scores of all three scoring systems are significantly correlated for the 1998 environmental reports, indicating that to some degree they are scoring the same features, but with quite a lot of scatter between the scores of one of the systems and those of the other two. There is, however, no correlation between the scores on the 1996 reports and the 1998 reports using the same systems on both. Evidently, most of the 1998 reports were not prepared with the intent of maximizing scores from any of the three scoring systems. Although the three systems achieve similar ranking of the 1998 reports for environmental comprehensiveness, the average normalized scores of one of the systems is significantly higher than those of the other two, reflecting a shorter list of topics and one more in keeping with the practices of the report writers. Because the scoring systems measure the number of topics covered and the depth of discussion rather than the quality of environmental performance, maximum scores could be obtained even with poor performance.