Corporate Governance and Climate Change Reporting in Malaysia

Climate change is real. It is real risks affecting all economies in the world. Many efforts have been taken by multilateral organizations and governments to minimise the impact of climate change and making all of us, especially corporate entities, to be more responsible toward sustainability issues. As a result, many firms are now more receptive toward the idea on the need of communicating issues concerning sustainability that affecting their activities with their stakeholders through various channels and engagements. The objective of this research is to examine, evaluate and explain the effect of corporate governance toward the extent of climate change reporting in the context of Malaysian environment. A sample of 150 public listed companies which shares are traded in Main Board of Bursa Malaysia Berhad (“Bursa Malaysia”) is used to test various hypotheses on the effect of corporate governance to the extent of disclosure of climate change information. The findings of the research reveal that only factors such as CEO’s educational background, CEO’s environmental experience, board gender diversity and ownership structure have significant effect on the extent of climate change reporting. On contrary, results on two corporate governance elements such as board size and board independence show insignificant relationship with extent of climate change reporting.