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Air and water pollution, waste disposal, deforestation and CO2 emissions are just a few of the environmental concern’s society is facing today. Despite the global efforts being made toward different environmental policies, environmental crimes have gradually increased (Ramírez & Palos-Sánchez, 2018). Internationally, there is an increased concern about the negative environmental impact of organisational activities (Bakan, 2004; Osborne & Ball, 2011). Nevertheless, research has focused mostly on trends in environmental disclosure by big corporations (Deegan et al., 2002), and attention to environmental transparency in the public sector has been rather low (Lodhia et al., 2012).
In terms of environmental disclosure in the public sector, a number of studies have used as a basis for content analysis (Dumay et al., 2010; Farneti & Guthrie, 2009; Lodhia et al., 2012) the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The GRI guidelines, developed in 1997, are the most developed sustainability reporting standards based on the triple bottom line approach (economic, environmental and social indicators), and for more than a decade, they have been the leading reporting framework for sustainability disclosure worldwide (Alazzani & Wan-Hussin, 2013; Alonso-Almeida et al., 2014; Ballou & Heitger, 2005; KPMG International, 2017; Roca & Searcy, 2012).
The organizations interested in GRI are not only companies, but governments, since widespread sustainability reporting can help drive progress toward sustainable development goals (GRI, 2019) and can be the basis of environmental information disclosure that is regarded as a prerequisite for local socioeconomic development and is a basic requirement of a transparent government (Kosajan et al., 2018). The environmental disclosure reported by the governments studied is not limited exclusively to the impact of their institution on the environment, but also takes into account any environmental information or action interesting to citizens based on the 300 series of GRI Standards issued in 2016, that is composed by the thematic standards that report the material impacts of an organization regarding environmental issues.
However, despite the existence of standardized environmental framework, public awareness is key to making a success in fighting environmental problems (Easman et al., 2018; Knee Tan et al., 2008). For this, there must be a well-informed public. Since disclosing environmental information to the public offers an opportunity for them to understand and develop stewardship about their environmental entities (Spash, 2002; Zheng et al., 2014) and they can increase their support to environment actions (Easman et al., 2018).
Environmental information disclosure is a significant subfield of government information disclosure (Kosajan et al., 2018) and having it from the government is an essential requirement for the exercise of citizenship (Quiroga, 2019). Governments worldwide have embraced environmental information disclosure as an indispensable key of their strategies to improve environmental conditions (Chen & Ting Cho, 2019). This means that the responsibility for disclosure of this information must be borne by all and sundry at all levels- national, regional and local (Oyero et al., 2018). Specially, the local government is at a relevant level to undertake the strategies of environmental governance (Wu et al., 2020), since they are the institutions more close to citizens to create them environmental public awareness. Although environmental information disclosure by local governments has been shown as a useful tool, for example for pollution control (Tian et al., 2016), their evidence has been understudied (Switzer, 2019).