Evaluating Variations in Corporate Environmental Performance

Funding body: HBOS plc (Insight Investment), Higher Education Innovations Fund, LSE, Leeds University

Amount: £80,000

Duration: 2003 on

Summary

This project, which was initially funded by Insight Investment and the LSE Higher Education Innovations Fund, has sought to evaluate the influence of corporate environmental policies and procedures on emissions and on local communities. It therefore relates closely to debates on corporate social responsibility, business and the environment, environmental policy and regulation and environmental justice. Finding that corporate environmental reports very rarely provide information that can be used to compare the environmental performance of different corporations or different industrial sites, the research has used information provided through government registers (such as the US Toxic Releases Inventory or the EU Polluting Emissions Register) to evaluate variations in corporate environmental performance. Using oil refineries as an example, early research found that there are significant variations in emissions of some key pollutants both across the range of refineries, with dirtier refineries tending to emit at least five times as much as cleaner refineries, and between the EU and the US, with refineries in the EU tending to emit more than twice as much as refineries in the US. At the local level, early research also found that there are correlations between higher levels of emissions from refineries and lower levels of income, employment and population density in the communities living next to the refineries. Although these findings provide support for some of the contentions of the 'Environmental Justice' movement, it is important to note that they do not say anything about causality, and as a result we cannot say definitively that companies adopt lower standards in poorer areas. However, on-going research is up-dating the analysis and looking at the range of factors that are leading to changes in corporate environmental performance and to any links between higher emissions and higher levels of social deprivation in local communities.

Contact: Andy Gouldson