Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment
Comparative studies of standalone environmental reports – European and Asian airlines
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
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