Abstract
If this new decade starts with many promises, the last 45 years have been contrasted between attempts to disprove the existence of climate change and to organize its resilience through a series of international environmental gatherings such as the Kyoto Protocol (1997), the COP 21 (2015) or the COP 26 (2021). Indeed, since the 2000s, regulation has been strengthened and many voluntary standards (GRI, CDP, IIRC, TCFD) have emerged to complement the existing regulatory framework while responding to society's expectations. The general objective of the thesis is to establish a link between scientific knowledge, societal expectations and institutional responses of companies through climate reporting on global warming. The thesis consists of three research articles with a common object of study: climate reporting. The three empirical studies in this thesis address different dimensions of this object of study. In all three studies, the unit of analysis considered is the company. The first chapter (paper 1) examines how the airline industry complies with the TCFD framework, which is seen as a vehicle for translating the IPCC's scientific knowledge on climate change. On the basis of environmental criteria, our sample represents over 65% of the sector's total emissions. The climate disclosures of twenty-four airlines are analyzed over the period 2015-2018. Although the quality of climate reporting improved from 2015 to 2018 (two years before and two years after the publication of the framework), our study documents that its compliance with TCFD recommendations is weak, specifically regarding companies' climate change strategies. The second chapter (paper 2), using climate reporting information, explores the notion of connectivity between financial and non-financial reporting using EFRAG's proposals (2021) based on the European taxonomy (2020). An exploratory study of the practices of the CAC40ESG firms is conducted and an in-depth study of direct connectivity is carried out. The results show a general weakness in connectivity and a lack of consistency in the accounting of direct connectivity. The article then discusses the future conditions for strengthening this connectivity with a view to reporting that would encourage virtuous behaviour. The third chapter (article 3), from a comprehensive and interpretative perspective, looks at the construction and use of climate reporting and the use of scientific knowledge to give credibility to the information presented. Based on semi-structured interviews with climate reporters and readers, our results show that reporters are under multiple pressures to report and that these pressures have accelerated since COP 21 and COP 26. However, with the variety of standards and the lack of harmonization of practices, climate reporting is still difficult to read and requires many adjustments by report readers. All these results show that climate reporting is constantly evolving, but it still needs to be developed to truly reflect the actions of companies in the fight against climate change.