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Abstract
The evidence of social and ecological responsibility has gained importance
in the forest product industry. Sustainability Reporting could be seen an
approach, which is able to capture effort and success of enterprises not only
within financial dimension. New types of multidimensional reports have
been developed in the last decade. However, little is known about reasons
for the restrictive use of the new report types and it remains open if the new
types are applicable in the forest products industries.
Therefore, in order to gain deeper knowledge in this respect a
survey was conducted involving 400 forest products enterprises located in
Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Special attention was given to attitudinal
and behavioural questions. Furthermore, results were analyzed with a
Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) which helped to detect the key components
that can explain the various level of satisfaction with reporting.
As the results indicated, generally low satisfaction with the present
reporting was concluded. Moreover, the BBN based sensitivity analysis
provided evidence that (e.g.) a positive attitude towards new reporting
standards and the publication of such new multidimensional reports
increases the utility perceived significantly. On the other hand, strong
negative influence was found for the publication of traditional report-types.
Hence, BBN proved to be a feasible approach to explain the inner
relationships and its explanatory power.
General recommendations for the future reporting in the forest
product sector can be deduced.