Vi tar tempen på ert CO₂-utsläpp!

: en studie av hållbarhetsredovisningars användbarhet

Abstract

The environment has become an important part in people´s lives, and in today´s society stakeholders demands have increased upon companies when it comes to sustainability reports. How these sustainability reports are designed depends on whom it’s for, laws and regulations, and the companies own norms and values. The purpose of sustainability reports is to measure, monitor and compare a company´s enviromental impact. It’s not only about integrating economics, but also enviromental and social standards together to get both financial and competitive advantages.

Sustainable Value method is a new model and is the first real method that can be used to evaluate a company´s resources, both financial, social and enviromental to a sustainable value.This model is used to compare the resource efficiency between companies.

In this thesis, a documentary study with an experimental approach has been made.Sustainability reports from six selected companies (in the engineering and forestry sector) have been investigated with respect to their accounting for carbon dioxide, and an experiment using the method “Sustainable Value Approach” was subsequently performed. The purpose of this study was to examine the usefulness of sustainability reports by using the Sustainable Value methodology. As a bonus, we determined how effective the six firms used their carbon resources, in monetary terms.

We found out, that all sustainability reports have been useful to make calculations under the Sustainable Value methodology. Only Atlas Copco gave a positive sustainable value (SV),which means that only Atlas Copco has generated higher returns with its carbon emissions compared to our benchmark had with the same emissions.