SCEM2022 第 26 屆營建工程與管理學術研討會 The 26th Symposium on Construction Engineering and Management
Relationships between Environmental Initiatives and Performance for Construction Companies Cindy Angelina1*, Andrew S. Chang2 1*
Master’s Student, Department of Civil Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. 2 Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. *cindyaaangelina@gmail.com
1. INTRODUCTION Environmental initiatives (EI) implementation would reduce environmental impact. Less environmental impact indicates better environmental performance (EP) for a company. Moreover, various stakeholders argue that companies with poor EP are less competitive (Yu & Ramanathan, 2015). Therefore, companies are more motivated to improve EP by adopting EIs that are shown in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Previous studies have discussed the bias in environmental reporting because it does not reflect the actual EI and performance (Sutantoputra et al., 2012). There is a weak and negative relationship between environmental disclosure and EP (Doan & Sassen, 2020). But other studies show a significant positive relationship between the level of discretionary disclosure and EP (Omran et al., 2021). This issue raises the question of what might influence the relationship between the initiative and performance. The contents in initiatives would influence the relationship between initiatives and impacts (Chang et al., 2021). Therefore, the contents of initiatives and performance disclosed by companies in CSR reports can be reviewed to verify the hypothesis. This study analyzes the relationships between EI and EP disclosed in the CSR reports of construction companies and finds a positive and medium correlation 0.472 between them. This result will be useful for a company to take EIs in reducing environmental impact and contributes to advancing sustainability reporting. 2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY The methods used in this research are literature review, content analysis, and case study. Initiatives were taken from 2019 CSR reports of five construction companies from different countries based on Engineering News-Record’s 2019 Top 250 International Contractors with English CSR reports. From the CSR reports, 38 initiatives were reviewed and examined. However, some of them were eliminated if they were not deliberately planned and developed in a program by an organization although the activity was related to a certain environmental topic. After removing eight noninitiatives, the remaining 30 initiatives were included to be further analyzed. The content of an initiative is the basis to distinguish the levels of initiatives (LI). LIs are used to determine the content depth of initiatives. LIs are established based on three references: GRI (2016), Montabon et al. (2007), and Epstein & Roy (2001). The score for LI is from 1 to 3 with the following criteria: Manage impact; Technologies, monitoring & controlling; Programs & plans metrics & goals expenditures. Table 1 shows the 30 EIs with corresponding indicators (material, energy, water, biodiversity, emission, effluent & waste) and the implementation methods including material, technology, and management, as well as LIs of 1, 2 or 3.
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