Environmental effects of sustainability management tools: An empirical analysis of large companies

Given the huge global environmental problems and their political and economic impacts, companies are challenged to improve their performance with regard to issues such as climate change. To successfully reduce corporate environmental impacts, management not only needs to develop environmental strategies, it also has to use effective sustainability management tools for their implementation. There are many studies reported in the literature on sustainability management tools such as life cycle assessments or sustainability reports. However, with few exceptions little is known about the efficacy of these tools. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data from the largest companies of five industrialized countries and empirically test the impact of implementing sustainability management tools on key dimensions of corporate environmental performance. The findings show that the implementation of sustainability management tools does reduce environmental impacts per unit of revenue. However, different groups of tools are found to be effective for different purposes.