Creative Commons

This dissertation was written as part of the MSc in Environmental Management & Sustainability at the International Hellenic University. Sustainable development is an issue that nowadays is ranked high on the global agenda. The interest worldwide during the past decades has depicted an incremental increase . According to the World Commission for Environment and Development (WCED), sustainable development is considered as prerequisite in order to be able to guarantee an auspicious future of the human civilization. Sustainability reporting is a global tendency by which enterprises are entangled into disclosing their overall financial , environmental and social corporate impacts and procedures . It can be looked at as a strategic management tool and as a communication process between a company and its stakeholders. With this dissertation a comprehensive insight of the sustainable development and sustainability terms is presented. The purpose of the thesis is to present a thorough analysis of sustainability reporting along with the depiction of a sustainability management framework and the motives that eventually lead to the formulation of sustainability reports. Finally , an overview of the guidelines, regulations and rankings that sustainability reports rely on is presented.