Taylor, LauraAdamson, Brent2015-09-152015-09-152015Major Paper, Master of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York Universityhttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/30197This research project has set out to determine how best a corporation can bridge the gap between sustainability reporting and operations and establish the overarching characteristics a corporation can implement in order to promote sustainability within their operations. In order to achieve this goal, I looked at two categorically different corporations: companies that have been proactive to sustainability and companies who have been reactive, those being corporations who have developed sustainability strategies in response to market pressures. Through a sustainabilitycomparative analysis, determining which category achieves sustainability goals more often and more successfully and a deeper analysis through interviews and further research to determine how corporations within each category promote sustainability initiatives within their organiza- tion differently, I was able to establish overarching sustainability characteristics. I determined corporations deemed proactive outperformed those deemed reactive when it comes to successful- ly achieving sustainability goals and that sustainability strategies are promoted differently name- ly through the integration of the sustainability departments into the corporate structure and im- plementation of sustainability initiatives into employee mandates. Ultimately I established a set of overarching characteristics that can be employed in order to promote sustainability and bridge the gap between sustainability reporting and operations: those being CEO buy-in, quantifiability, disclosure and integrative reporting.enAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.Major paper