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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Introduction and purpose of the study
Sustainability, the concept that has arrived maybe with 50 years of delay, is the new buzzword all over the globe. From greenwashing to becoming a real worry, and for some a new business purpose built in the DNA of their organizations, this concept seems to be an unavoidable one in the context of the actual organizations communication departments. The research question that formed the skeleton of the research here being presented even if it has everything to do with sustainability did not use this broader concept in the formulation of the research question or in the analysis but a very concrete aspect of the "sustainability" worries.
How do the organizations belonging to the Global Compact Network Portugal with 2020 reports publicly accessible online express in their sustainability reports, or in their absence, in their activity reports, sustainability issues and in particular the organization's concerns with the "climate"? What use do they make of the concepts of "climate change" and "climate crisis"?
Literature review
The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility is understood in a very broad sense and in a formulation indistinguishable from another notion, Corporate Citizenship. If we use these concepts without the search - which is certainly too complex for the purposes of this work - for a full definition, and therefore much more in the sense so dear to Wittgenstein (1953) of family resemblances, we cannot help but focus on their dimension (we know that it is artificially cut) of environmental responsibility.
The notion of 'sustainability' has increasingly been employed with a very broad focus. Although internationally and in the reports of the most important organizations, or even as defined already in 2019 by "The Guardian", "It's a crisis, not a change. (...) Climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the overall situation".
Methodology
This research is focused on the 84 Portuguese organizations that are part of the UN Global Compact, an initiative in the area of corporate citizenship, which originated from a proposal by the former UN Secretary General in 2000. It is based on ten principles, in the areas of human rights, labor practices, environmental protection and anti-corruption, and aims to promote the public and voluntary commitment of companies to comply with them.
48 out of these 84 organizations had available online or sent to the researchers after being contacted, their sustainability or activity reports. Therefore, 26 sustainability reports and 22 activity reports were analyzed.
A thematic categorical analysis of manifest messages was performed. NVivo software was used to support data collection and analysis. The categories were defined in a concept-driven strategy and coincide with the major themes under analysis based on the Global Compact proposal, regarding Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Results and conclusions
As argued above, the concept of climate 'crisis' should be preferred to that of climate 'change' to refer to the challenges the world faces. However, in Portugal, little or nothing has been developed from the point of view of communication, and more particularly, of Corporate Communication / Public Relations to understand all these issues.
Only 5 out of the 48 reports analyzed present the expression "climate crisis" throughout their pages to refer to the current situation of humanity. It is also curious to note that of the 5 organizations, we could only consider that 4 assume that we are effectively living a climate crisis, because in one of the reports, the sentence is built in the future, as if it were something still hypothetical, that we can prevent, and not yet a reality. If we look at the expression "climate emergency", it only appears in 4 of the reports. Moreover, the term "climate change" is used by 33 out of 48 organizations. And we found "Environmental Sustainability" in 27 documents analyzed.
Practical and social implications
We intend to present a reflection on how organizations communicate their Corporate Social Responsibility practices in aspects more directly related to climate change or the climate crisis. At the same time, it is the authors' intention to promote recognition of the importance of communication for social and behavioral change in the area of climate, as well as its importance in combating the climate emergency. In this way, we hope to contribute to the ethical accountability of communication professionals when working on the topic of climate change / climate crisis from now on.
The CSR reports represent in our neo-liberal societies one of the most relevant aspects of the expression (so many times in figures) not only of the financial health of the organizations but especially of the real worries that have underlined all the CEOs in a certain year.
Description
Keywords
Sustainability Climate emergency Climate crisis Climate change Global Compact IPL/2021/4C_ESCS
Citation
Eiró-Gomes, M., Raposo, A. & Nunes, T. (2023, jun, 30). Environmental sustainability: The role of communication in organizational responsibility. Paper presented at BledCom 2023 (30th International Public Relations Research Symposium), Bled, Slovenia.
Publisher
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences