Academic Editor: Gaetano della Corte
Received: 1 January 2025
Revised: 29 January 2025
Accepted: 31 January 2025
Published: 2 February 2025
Citation: Xu, B.; Jamal, N.M.; Liu, Y.;
Yahya, T.B. Board Diversity and
Environmental Disclosure: A Review,
Current Insights, and Emerging
Trends. Sustainability 2025, 17, 1211.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su17031211
Copyright: © 2025 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
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(https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/).
Review
Board Diversity and Environmental Disclosure: A Review,
Current Insights, and Emerging Trends
Bikun Xu * , Noriza Mohd Jamal, Yue Liu and Taher Ben Yahya
Faculty of Management, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Skudai Johor 81310, Malaysia
* Correspondence: beckyxu0117@gmail.com
Abstract: As the challenges of environmentally friendly development continue to inten-
sify, the governance mechanisms of environmental disclosure have become particularly
important. Although studies have explored the governance determinants of environmental
disclosure, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview in the existing literature that ad-
dresses board diversity. To fill this gap, this study provides an in-depth analysis of board
diversity that promotes environmental disclosure by systematically reviewing 74 relevant
papers from the Scopus database. In addition to utilizing qualitative content analysis based
on a systematic literature review, this study distinguishes and identifies board diversity
factors influencing environmental disclosure through quantitative bibliometric analysis
using a descriptive analysis. The results not only summarize the key findings of the existing
literature but also suggest directions for future research, providing new perspectives that
could aid in understanding and improving board diversity in environmental disclosure.
Furthermore, this study identifies a number of challenges in practice, such as the difficulties
that may be encountered in collecting and validating accurate environmental data. The
study highlights the importance of board diversity for better environmental disclosure and
suggests future research directions. Policymakers and management are urged to promote
board diversity to improve environmental disclosure, which can enhance a company’s
performance and societal value.
Keywords: board diversity; environmental disclosure; environmental sustainability; sys-
tematic literature review; content analysis
1. Introduction
In recent years, institutions, governments, and business stakeholders have shown
heightened awareness regarding environmental preservation and corporate sustainabil-
ity. In response to this growing pressure, many organizations have begun to integrate
environmental reporting into their corporate sustainability strategies. The United Nations
Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative (SSEI) indicates that each of the major corporations
must publish their environmental performance by 2030.
Environmental disclosure (ED) serves as an effective mechanism for governments
to promote collective environmental accountability. It communicates non-financial infor-
mation mostly via narrative descriptions [1]. The clarity of such narratives influences the
practicality of environmental communication and determines message content. Conse-
quently, an increasing number of stakeholders anticipate that businesses will operate with
greater transparency, ethics, and responsibility, leading to a considerable rise in corpo-
rate environmental disclosure. These evolving expectations have prompted companies to
actively build their brands by improving their environmental disclosure.
Sustainability 2025, 17, 1211 https://doi.org/10.3390/su17031211