Efficient information provision for environmental and sustainability reporting

Environmental concerns have become a key issue for society as well as for individuals and businesses. To cope up with the pressure imposed by their various stakeholders increasingly demanding for "green" production, enterprises are constrained to balance their goals of economic growth, environmental protection and usage of natural resources. Environmental reporting provides a comprehensive and structured approach to inform the target groups about the proper environmental strategies and to present a transparent profile. Recent studies show that environmental reporting is spreading rapidly. To enable consistency and comparability, several organizations provide guidelines, standards and recommendations to guide organizations in their environmental management. Environmental reporting is mainly used by organizations as a medium to demonstrate compliance with applicable national and European level environmental regulations. In the last decades, they are also increasingly being used as a tool to communicate environmental matters to various stakeholders. The purpose of this chapter is to deliver fundamentals of environmental reporting based on a comprehensive literature review and a recent project in Germany. Moreover, the authors suggest two approaches to support data gathering and report generation processes for environmental reporting purposes of organizations.