Climate Change Risks Disclosure: Do Business Strategy and Management Characteristics Matter?

Abstract

This research aims to broaden the understanding of the determinants of climate change disclosure, where the study analyzes the impact of corporate business strategy and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) overconfidence on the level of climate change disclosure. The study followed a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative and qualitative techniques to comprehensively examine the relationships used by the content analysis method to analyze the annual reports of a sample of Saudi companies for the period from 2019 to 2022 to measure the level of disclosure of practices related to climate change. The results of the study show that the companies that tend to adopt the initiative strategy provide more information about climate change than the defending companies do, while the CEO’s overconfidence does not affect the level of climate change disclosure. The results of the study indicate that the nature of the strategic direction adopted by the company is more important in determining the motives for disclosing climate change information than the personal characteristics of management.

Keywords

• climate change risks
• corporate disclosure
• business strategy
• CEO overconfidence
• Saudi business environment