The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how Finnish listed companies report environmental information in their financial statements. In addition to that the intent was to ex-amine comprehensive environmental reporting of companies in question considering also voluntary reporting. It was also intended to compare obligatory reporting and voluntary reporting regarding environmental information. This work was not assigned by a third party, but was executed based on the interest of the author.

This thesis can be divided to two parts, i.e. theoretical framework and empirical research. Corporate social responsibility, environmental accounting, and environmental reporting were defined in the theoretical framework. After that the legislation and the guidelines of environmental reporting were addressed.

In the research part of the study an environmental reporting of eight Finnish listed companies was covered. It was investigated how the environmental reporting was addressed in different financial statement documents by each of the companies. In addition to this an overview was made regarding voluntary environmental reporting. The research was carried out as a qualitative research, and the method used was a case study.

The study results revealed that the financial statements and reports of activities from the companies contained varying amounts of environmental information. Each of the companies followed the minimum requirements of legislation. Two of the companies had followed closely the guidelines of the Finnish Accounting Standards Board concerning report of activities. Half of the companies presented both monetary and non-monetary environmental information. However two of the companies barely addressed environmental information in their financial statements or reports of activities.

Comprehensive environmental reporting was on a desirable level with all the companies when considering voluntary reporting. Most companies had created an extensive corporate social responsibility report consistent with GRI guidelines. In the future this topic could be researched for example by making reminiscent research using smaller companies. Also the new integrated reporting could be a topic for future research.