The Corporate Interest in Climate Change Issues: Analyzing Annual Reports in Asian Public Listed Companies Covering the Period 2000 - 2009

Abstract: Unlimited demands of development and non-stopped destruction of surrounding environments cause many environmental problems. In this paper, Climate Change as one important issue has been studied against an Asian background. For the purpose of showing a clear trend of communicated corporate awareness in global Climate Change issues, in this report, seventy Asian companies have been studied. The results show a relatively low-level growth curve of communicated corporate Climate Change awareness by dissecting companies’ CEO Letters during years 2000 to 2009, followed by a comparison study with European results and five possible explanations in the discussion part. As the conclusion of this paper, an increased interest among Asian governments and companies during year 2000-2009 has been observed. However, there is still lack of knowledge on a general level compared with the European results. According to the five possible explanations, several possible future studies have also been recommended in the paper: 1) Comparison study under the same scope within Asia or other continents; 2) Case-study on specific interested companies; 3) On-going study on the future curve trend with the same target group.