Factors affecting environmental reporting quality: A research on Borsa İstanbul Manufacturing Sector

The damage caused by the companies to the environment has an important place in the climate crisis and the increase in the level of environmental pollution. At this point, it is important for companies to exhibit preventive activities and report their environmental activities in a transparent manner in order to protect the environmental heritage that will be left to future generations as a common heritage for a livable world. As a matter of fact, stakeholders expect the company's management to be aware of environmental responsibility within the framework of social responsibility and to provide qualified information about their environmental performance. In addition to the fact that the information presented in this framework is in accordance with reality and needs, it is necessary to continuously improve and develop the reporting in the transmission of information to information users in a qualitative-quantitative-monetary and non-monetary manner. In this context, it is important to determine the factors that affect the environmental reporting quality. The aim of this study is to reveal the environmental reporting quality of 199 companies traded in the Borsa Istanbul Manufacturing Sector and to determine the factors affecting the disclosure quality. At this point, the research is based on the analysis of the activity and sustainability reports published by manufacturing companies between 2017-2021, coding and scoring in line with the environmental disclosure index (a total of 46 disclosure items in nine different categories). Therefore, first of all, these reports will be subjected to content analysis and the effects of the factors determined within the framework of the literature review on the quality of the disclosure will be analyzed. Appropriate statistical and econometric methods will be used in the analysis to be made and the findings will be presented comparatively. In this context, the thesis will be organized in three parts. In the first part, environmental reporting will be explained in detail in general terms, in the second part, the factors affecting the quality of environmental reporting will be explained within the framework of the literature, and in the third part, the methodological details of the research will be given. Finally, the study will be concluded in the light of the findings and some suggestions will be made.