Background and problem discussion: Sustainable development and corporate socialresponsibility are more and more important issues in the business world. Companies wantto increasingly disclose information on their sustainable performance, and for exampledisclosures on environmental performance help organizations to manage relationshipswith their stakeholders. Most of the sustainable reporting follows the Global ReportingInitiatives Guidelines. Furthermore, reporting can be influenced by public concern,culture, size and environment-sensitivity of the company.Aims: This study aims to examine what environmental disclosures look like betweenFinnish and Swedish forest, paper and pulp industry companies. Comparison is done byexamining sustainability and annual reports of selected companies.Method and theory: This study concentrates on environmental disclosures insustainability and annual reports of forest companies. The theoretical framework is basedon voluntary and mandatory regulations, and furthermore, on cultural, legitimacy andstakeholder theories. The method used to analyze companies is an extended contentanalysis model, so called CONI (consolidated narrative interrogation) model, developedby Beck, Campbell and Shrives (2006).Empirical findings: The empirical findings consist of investigating environmentaldisclosures in sustainability and annual reports of three Finnish and three Swedish forest,paper and pulp industry companies. Most of the CONI models categories can be found inthe reports, and environmental disclosures are comprehensive. Majority of the disclosuresare similar and disclosure type is mostly narrative.Conclusion: There are many similarities in environmental reporting between forestindustry companies in Finland and Sweden. Companies operating in same,environmentally intensive industry tend to have many environmental disclosures andthese disclosures tend to be similar. In addition, companies report that it is profitable tobe sustainable.
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