Sustainability reporting: the environmental impacts of digitalization

Environmental concerns are increasing public pressure on companies' transparency in environmental disclosures and prompting companies to seek new solutions such as digitalization to reduce their environmental damage. The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which companies disclose environmental information in sustainability reporting and how they utilize digitalization to reach set environmental goals. This study aimed to answer questions about the extent of the companies’ disclosed environmental information, the differences between mandatory and voluntary information, and to determine whether the quality of environmental information has changed over the years. The novelty of this study is that, along with environmental, information related to digitization activities is analyzed to investigate whether companies use digitization solutions to achieve environmental goals. This study's results showed that the extent of environmental information disclosure is quite low in sustainability reports and websites of the Lithuanian Responsible Business Association members. Nevertheless, the extent of environmental information disclosure has been increasing every year, especially in the year of 2020. This change can be explained by the strong governmental and nongovernmental focus on environmental issues in Lithuania. However, these companies do not express a strong tendency to use digital technologies to achieve environmental goals based on the information disclosed by sustainability reporting. Therefore, this does not support the theoretical assumption about the benefits of digitization for sustainable environmental development. However, the results of the year 2020 analysis show that this situation is changing. The Covid-19 pandemic may be the cause of the increased use of digitalization activities.