Keele Research Repository

The ultimate question of most business practitioners and policy makers now is how to reduce corporate negative environmental performance. One of the most effective ways is to help corporations to set the key performance indicators (KPIs) of their sustainability performance and to report these KPIs to their stakeholders using corporate reporting cycle. To improve the environmental reporting quality, companies generally adopt and follow widely recognised reporting guidelines and third-party assurance standards, thus improving their environmental disclosure quality and trustworthiness in minds of their stakeholders. Over the last two decades a number of global initiatives (e.g. GRI, ISO, DEFRA, AA1000 APS, and ISAE 3000) have been developed for use in sustainability reporting. This chapter, therefore, aims to shed light on these credibility initiatives developed by governmental and non-governmental bodies to improve the quality of environmental reporting and to see the extent to which these credibility initiatives are different or similar.