Direct and Indirect Relationships between Corporate Environmental Disclosure and Financial Performance_ A Test of SDG 12 in a Less-Developed Context

This study investigates the impact of board size and industry sensitivity on the correlation between environmental disclosure measures and the financial performance of listed companies in Nigeria's non-financial sector.The paper relies on DICTION software to compute the environmental disclosure proxies, descriptive statistics and regression analysis using robust panel corrected standard errors to find out the link between corporate environmental disclosure and return on assets using board size and industry sensitivity as the intervening variables.We analysed 42 Nigerian-listed firms from 2011 to 2022.Our investigation focused on how environmental disclosure, as measured by volume environmental disclosure (VED), general environmental disclosure tone (GED), and specific environmental disclosure tone (SED), impacts firm financial performance, which is measured by return on assets (ROA).We also looked at how board size and industry sensitivity influence this relationship.The empirical results reveal that the general environmental disclosure has a significant direct positive effect on ROA.Additionally, both the specific and volume of environmental disclosure have a direct negative effect on return on assets.We document that board size positively moderates the relationships between specific and volume of environmental disclosure on