L’EVOLUZIONE DELLA DISCLOSURE NON FINANZIARIA: UN’INDAGINE EMPIRICA

Sustainability and climate change issues have received significant attention in recent years, leading the European Commission, national jurisdictions and professional organisations to focus on the need to integrate them into non-financial disclosure. The objective of this thesis is to analyse the most recent evolution of non-financial reporting, i.e. that related to climate change, also trying to understand the current level of disclosure of climate change-related information. To this end, the thesis first analysed the most recent initiatives to improve this form of disclosure, and then carried out a case study on a sample of 29 companies, belonging to the automotive, electronics and energy sectors, which published their non-financial disclosure for the year 2020. The thesis highlights that the main and most recent initiatives on climate change are the European Commission's 2019 guidelines, the Recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive proposal, while the empirical analysis conducted shows that the level of climate change disclosure is medium-low, because of an overall climate-related information indicator of 22.16 out of 63. In the light of these considerations, the thesis provides useful information for companies, managers and policy-makers, as they have to make a further effort to improve climate-related disclosure.