CLP and Towngas: A case study on the readability of sustainability reports

Readability impacts sustainability report comprehension, as readers, especially laypeople, struggle to decode less readable reports (Farewell, Fisher, & Daily, 2014). As a result, this draws our attention to the different degree of readability in sustainability reports produced by different companies. This paper proposes a case study on the readability of the sustainability reports produced by two different types of energy companies in Hong Kong – an electric company CLP Power and a gas supplier Towngas. CLP claims that it generates, transmits and distributes power from clean fuels (CLP Power, n.d.), while Towngas does not mention renewable energy explicitly. CLP has also released more sustainability materials, such as content index and assurance reports, than Towngas. Therefore, the electric company has a more sustainable outlook than the gas supplier; hence, the CLP sustainability reports are expected to be more readable than the Towngas ones. In order to compare their readabilities, this paper follows Abu-Bakar and Ameer (2011) and Smeuninx et al. (2020) to measure the average word length, sentence length, lexical density, syntactic complexity, passivization, and Flesch readability score of the sustainability reports by each company. Ultimately, the readability difference, if any, will be analyzed to discuss company branding and readiness for sustainability.