Disclosure Architecture in South African Mining: Environmental and Climate-Resilience Reporting, 2015–2025

This study examines whether backward-looking corporate environmental disclosure (CED) and forward-looking climate-resilience reporting (CLIM) constitute empirically distinct disclosure architectures in 19 JSE-listed mining firms over 2015–2025 (208 firm-years; 189 consecutive transitions), and whether directors’ ownership helps explain their differences. Original 0–4 scores show that CED is concentrated at score 3 (88.5%). Descriptively, 91.5% of CED transitions retain the same score, compared with 79.4% for CLIM; firm-level trajectories likewise show broader CED stability and greater CLIM movement. These comparisons describe the observed panel and do not provide a formal test of the persistence difference. Because the two constructs use different evidence anchors on the common 0–4 maturity scale, part of the observed contrast may reflect construct-specific rubric calibration. Directors’ ownership is weakly and imprecisely associated with both outcomes, and the adjusted CED–CLIM ownership contrast is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Secondary quadratic and CED institutional-period estimates are sample-sensitive and interpreted descriptively. The contribution is architectural: CED and CLIM differ in content, distribution and temporal behaviour, but those differences do not translate into reliably different ownership sensitivities.