ABSTRACT
Corporate environmental reporting first emerged during a period of ‘social accounting’, which began in the early 1970s and occurred principally in North America.
Corporations tried many forms o f reporting: within the annual report or within a separate booklet; in financial numbers, in nonfinancial quantities, in words and pictures; the reports were for employees or management or society-at-large; some were audited, some not; they covered one or more of: plans, polices, interactions with communities, charitable giving, levels of pollution and emissions, energy usage, employment data, health and safety at work, etc... There was virtually no regulatory back-up to these experiments and by the mid-to late-1970s the experiments had all but disappeared and interest in the field had waned to a vestigial level all over the world (Gray, 1994].
