Prior research suggests that voluntary environmental
governance mechanisms operate to enhance a
firm’s environmental legitimacy as opposed to being a
driver of proactive environmental performance activities.
To understand how these mechanisms contribute to the
firm’s environmental legitimacy, we investigate whether
environmental corporate governance characteristics are
associated with voluntary environmental disclosure. We
examine an increasingly important attribute of a firm’s
disclosure setting, namely the disclosure of greenhouse gas
(GHG) information. GHG information represents proprietary
non-financial information about the firm’s exposure to
environmental concerns and is related to the firm’s operations
and future profitability. Thus, we expect governance
participants would view such information as a potentially
important strategic device for managing stakeholders’
demands for information concerning environmental risks.
We find that the presence of an environmental committee
and a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is positively
associated with the likelihood of GHG disclosure and that
CSOs are associated with disclosure transparency. Further
analysis reveals that the likelihood of disclosure is associated
with committee size, number of committee meetings,
expertise of committee members and CSO, and
overlap between the environmental committee and audit
committee. Only expertise of the environmental committee
members and the CSO are associated with GHG disclosure
transparency, while larger committees tend to be associated
with lower transparency. Our results are particularly
important to those with interests in evaluating the potential
role that corporate governance mechanisms play in
responding to stakeholder concerns about environmental
risks. Directors and officers who are considering appointment
to similar governance positions, may wish to consider
what attributes would make such governance positions
more influential.