Comparative studies of standalone environmental reports – European and Asian airlines

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2006.10.003Get rights and content

Abstract

This study is based on a survey of the environmental reports of a sample of airlines in Europe and the Asia Pacific region to identify the status and progress of environmental reporting. The findings reveal that only airlines in 12 countries have published standalone environmental reports. These reports were examined. Looking at 16 elements in the environmental reports. It was found that most elements were mentioned in the reports but that the definition of fuel efficiency in the environmental performance element differed between them making benchmarking a problem.

Introduction

At the Rio Earth Summit (1992), delegates adopted Chapter 30 of Agenda 21 to encourage business and industry ‘to report annually on their environmental records as well as on their use of energy and natural resources’ (United Nations Environmental Program Industry and Environment Office, 1994). In 1998, the International Federation of Accountants (1998) echoed this view and released an International Auditing Practice Statement about including environmental matters when auditing financial statements. At a United Nations conference, another professional accounting association recommended an environmental reporting framework for annual reports, and more recently launched a global report initiative (Adams, 1998, Adams, 2002). In 2002, the Air Transport Action Group prepared a report on aviation for the United Nations Environmental Programme.

Many airlines in developed nations now publish regular reports about their accomplishments in environmental improvements. There are, however, few publications about environmental reporting or accounting in the airline industry in the international literature (Chan and Lam, 2001a, Chan and Lam, 2001b). The main objectives here are to map the status of environmental reporting by airlines based in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region; to identify the major components of the environmental reports and to examine the performance indicators used, policy statements, and management systems.

Section snippets

Methodology

Data was collected from airline environmental reports and environmental information registered on airlines’ official websites. The exclusion of US airlines is due to the ‘perceived aggressiveness’ of US solicitors. Groβbongardt (2001) explained that US lawyers representing various interest groups routinely participate in litigation between airlines and local residents. This makes the published pollution data of the US airlines more sensitive, so airlines and airports in the US have become

Findings

Only eight Europe-based airlines and four Asia-Pacific-based airlines2 published standalone environmental reports on a continuous basis. Their formal reports described the progress of environmental management in their operations. Europe-based and Japanese airlines have published standalone environmental reports for more than

Conclusions

This study has shown that 14 airlines in Europe and Asia have recognized the need to publish standalone environmental reports and have devoted varying degrees of effort and resources to producing such reports. Basically, all of the studied airlines largely followed Adams’s guidelines to enrich the content of their environmental reports, though there is still room for improvement. This study indicates that the reports produced by European airlines were richer in content than those of their

References (13)

  • E.S.W. Chan et al.

    Motivations for ISO 14001 in the hotel industry

    Tourism Management

    (2006)
  • U. Steger

    Environmental management system: Empirical evidence and further perspectives

    European Management Journal

    (2000)
  • R. Adams

    Accounting for the environment–latest steps at the UN

    Environmental Accounting and Auditing Reporter

    (1998)
  • Adams, R., 2002. The case for smart legislation – the detail must be flexible. Institute of Public Policy Research....
  • W. Chan et al.

    Environmental costing of electricity consumption in the Hong Kong hotel industry

    Asia-Pacific Journal of Tourism Research

    (2001)
  • W. Chan et al.

    Environmental accounting of municipal solid waste in the hotel industry

    Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research

    (2001)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (28)

  • Sustainability reporting in the airline industry: Current literature and future research avenues

    2022, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment
    Citation Excerpt :

    Similarly, Eccles et al. (2012) indicated how climate change-related material information in the US-based annual reports lacked comparability and called for the need to define materiality on a sector-specific basis. Moreover, differences in SR practices were noticed between different regions (Mak et al., 2007) and specific nations (Kemp and Vinke, 2012; Mak and Chan, 2007), even between carrier groups (Rudari and Johnson, 2015) and within the groups such as low-fare airlines (LFAs) (Coles et al., 2014). Despite the identified differences, some commonalities were also found.

  • What impacts sustainability reporting in the global aviation industry? An institutional perspective

    2019, Transport Policy
    Citation Excerpt :

    Accordingly, prior studies documented that a growing number of companies in the aviation industry are incorporating CSR notion into their business policies, strategies, and activities (e.g. GRI, 2009; Sheldon and Park, 2011). To date, however, CSR communication of aviation companies has been rarely investigated by the prior literature (e.g. Mak et al., 2007; Kemp and Vinke, 2012; Skouloudis et al., 2012; Kılkış and Kılkış, 2016; Vourvachis et al., 2016). The present paper aims to fill this gap by exploring CSR communication in the aviation industry through the empirical examination of the sustainability reports published by aviation companies.

  • Taking-off corporate social responsibility programs: An AHP application in airline industry

    2018, Journal of Air Transport Management
    Citation Excerpt :

    The study is performed using three basic criteria of “Economic”, “Environment” and “Social” initiatives for CSR programs. The following hierarchy of these three criteria is determined in line with the classification provided in Cowper-Smith and de Grosbois (2011) and other studies (Chang et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2012; Coles et al., 2014; Ilkhanizadeh and Karatepe, 2017; Lynes and Andrachuk, 2008; Mak et al., 2007; Tsai and Hsu, 2008; Wang et al., 2015). Due to the scarcity of the literature, the authors extended this classification by consulting an experts' panel including academicians and airline managers.

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text