Relatórios ambientais : relevância e harmonização das informações sobre desempenho ambiental no setor de energia elétrica

Abstract

The debate on environmental questions on the world stage has led to an increase in the publication of social and environmental reports by business organizations. In this trend, this study focused on analyzing how companies in Brazil's electricity sector are reporting their environmental content in social and environmental reports, considering the relevance and harmonization of information. The research sample focused on the 40 (forty) companies in the electricity sector, which participated in the BM&FBOVESPA initiative, entitled Report or Explain for Sustainability Report or Integrated 2016, which positively positioned themselves in relation to the publication of the Socio-environmental Report for the year 2015. In order to achieve the objectives proposed in this research, we opted for the technique of content analysis, the collection of data focused on the socio-environmental reports of 2015, to document and guide the data collection phase, a cheklist was elaborated, which allowed to know the profile of the companies investigated, the profile of the published sustainability reports and finally, the environmental reports that were subdivided into 04 (four) categories and associating 20 (twenty) variables (indicators), from the study of Nossa (2002), Murcia et al., (2008) and the guidelines established by NBC T15. The process of analysis and interpretation of the collected data was performed with the support of descriptive and inferential statistics, the equation for calculating the level of disclosure and the Spearman correlation coefficient. The findings confirmed that the form of declarative type disclosure is still preponderant in socio-environmental reports. The highest average observed for the general disclosure level was 0,67 earned by companies CEMIG and ENGIE, while the lowest level was 0.14 obtained by EMAE. In relation to the environmental disclosure index by category, it was verified that the highest levels are concentrated in the categories Socio-environmental Policies (0,67) and Environmental Education and Research (0,57). As a general conclusion, confirm that the environmental information evidenced in the socio-environmental reports published by companies in the Brazilian electricity sector are not reported in a standardized and uniform way. In this way, the comparative analysis of the environmental performance between the companies of the same sector and that operate in a similar institutional environment is not possible.