Forthcoming research in Academy of Management Perspectives (AMP) by Dylan Minor and coauthors, Magali A. Delmas, Kelly Clark, and Tyson Timmer studies a central problem in corporate climate and sustainability reporting: companies often present environmental numbers with a level of precision that the underlying science and data cannot truly support. The paper argues that the real challenge in sustainability disclosure is not simply transparency, but credibility. In other words, publishing more numbers does not automatically make a company more trustworthy if those numbers rest on weak assumptions, incomplete measurement systems, or uncertain cause-and-effect relationships.
