New trends in corporate reporting: Information on carbon footprint in Spain

Abstract

In accordance with the Kyoto Protocol, Spain has created a National Carbon Footprint Registry by Royal Decree 163/2014. This constitutes a pioneering initiative to help Spanish companies give visibility to their efforts in reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Hence, this paper explores the motivation of Spanish companies to register their carbon footprints with a higher degree of scope. We identify the characteristics of the first Spanish companies that registered their carbon footprint through a logistic regression model (logit). The study concludes that organizations are more likely to register a higher scope if they do not belong to the manufacturing sector, if they are relatively new, and have a culture of environmental transparency.

Keywords

• Environmental performance
• financial performance
• environmental disclosure
• carbon footprint
• environmental accounting