ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Internet as an environmental communications and information management tool, and discusses the key criteria for creating and maintaining an effective environmental reporting website. Environmental reporting is becoming more sophisticated as well as more widespread, as demonstrated by the fact that environmental reports are now appearing in different formats as companies experiment with different communication methods. Azzone identified various core stakeholder groups for environmental reports and analysed each for their preferred content requirements and preferred media for receiving environmental information. Organisations and universities can also play an important role in empowering stakeholders to compare companies on an individual basis and enabling benchmarking: for example, by commenting on companies' environmental reports or by signposting environmental reporting websites. Hard-copy environmental reports are frequently directly translated by external Internet design companies into HyperText Mark-up Language, the formatting language used by the World Wide Web, and then directly transferred to the Internet.
