An Exploratory Study on Water Reporting among Top Malaysian Public Listed Companies

Climate change has brought a significant impact on the availability of water resources. This problem is further intensified by the increasing cases of water pollution affecting both the volume and quality of water. The water rationing exercise as currently being implemented in certain major cities in Malaysia would be a good example to demonstrate the severity of the issue. This has made business entities at the center of discussion as the way they withdraw, use, and discharge water impact significantly on the water resources availability and quality. Motivated by the opportunity accounting system could potentially offer to mitigate this issue, the present study aims to explore the extent and quality of water reporting among the top 10 Malaysian public listed companies based on market capitalization and water risk profile. By content analyzing the companies’ annual report, the findings show that water-related disclosure is still fairly low among the ten companies with most of the information score only ‘1’ in terms of quality. While findings the exact factors leading to these findings is beyond the scope of this study, the fact that this issue is currently being discussed at international level and the companies are sharing this natural resources with the society, the need for water-related disclosure is still there if the companies want to legitimize their position among the society. It is the role of the regulators to facilitate provision of such information without compromising the need of various parties including the companies.