Jul 2026· Journal of Environmental Management· Vol 414, pp.
130453
· 0 citations· 25 references
Medicine
Abstract
Decarbonizing the power sector is central to achieving the Paris Agreement's temperature goals, yet rigorous evidence on whether binding climate commitments actually deliver measurable reductions in electricity-sector emissions remains scarce. This paper asks whether the formal adoption of binding climate commitments reduces power-sector emission intensity in G20 economies, and whether green bond issuance amplifies this effect. We construct an annual panel for 19 G20 countries over 2014-2024, combining satellite-based power-sector CO2 emissions, macroeconomic indicators, hand-coded policy adoption dates, and country-level green bond issuance. Exploiting the staggered adoption of Paris-aligned commitments between 2016 and 2022 as quasi-experimental variation, we apply heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences and event-study estimators. We find that binding climate commitments reduce power-sector emission intensity by approximately 9-12%, with effects emerging immediately at adoption and persisting for at least seven years without significant attenuation. These reductions reflect genuine absolute emission cuts rather than slower GDP growth, providing evidence of strong decoupling in the G20 power sector. By contrast, green bond intensity does not exert a statistically significant incremental effect once policy adoption is accounted for, suggesting that regulatory commitment - rather than labelled financial flows is the primary driver of observed decarbonisation at current scales. Effects are systematically larger in high-income and high-emitting countries. The study offers one of the first post-Paris, sector-specific causal evaluations across the full G20, embeds green finance within a formal policy evaluation framework, and demonstrates the value of modern event-study designs for climate policy analysis.
This paper introduces carbon responsibility (
CR
) as a policy‐anchored measure of firms' effective carbon liability under the
EU
Emissions Trading System (
EU ETS
).
CR
is simulated by combining sector‐specific allocation rules with prevailing carbon prices and scaling the resulting liability by market value, thereby capturing firms' exposure to priced carbon relative to size. Using panel data on 682 European firms from 2013 to 2024, we examine the relationship between
CR
and carbon performance (
CP
), defined as revenue per ton of emissions. Results show a robust negative association: firms with higher
CR
tend to exhibit lower
CP
, consistent with transitional compliance costs reducing near‐term efficiency. The strength of this relationship depends on governance and institutional conditions. Performance‐oriented pay amplifies the adverse
CR
‐
CP
link, while third‐party verification further tightens accountability pressures. By contrast, state ownership mitigates adverse effects, reflecting institutional support and longer planning horizons. Internal carbon pricing shows limited firm‐level impact but serves as a stronger disciplining mechanism when adopted broadly across industries. These findings highlight the conditional nature of regulatory accountability, advance the literature by integrating governance and assurance moderators into the carbon‐pricing–performance nexus, and offer practical guidance for firms, regulators, and policymakers seeking to align carbon market design with corporate responses.
Shaocong Bo, Vittorio Laus, Enrico Battisti et al.· Corporate Social Responsibil...· 0 citations
This study aims to examine the comparative and joint association of voluntary and regulatory climate governance mechanisms with firm-level carbon emission intensity. Specifically, it investigates whether participation in the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is associated with stronger reductions than exposure to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), and whether the two mechanisms operate as complements.
The study uses an unbalanced panel of 1,265 European firms observed from 2015 to 2023, compiled from Refinitiv ESG, CDP, Refinitiv financial statements, the official SBTi database and EU ETS sector classifications. The empirical strategy combines difference-in-differences estimation, firm fixed effects, nearest-neighbor matching and event-study diagnostics to assess the estimated associations of SBTi adoption, EU ETS exposure and their interaction with firm-level emission intensity.
SBTi adoption is negatively and statistically significantly associated with firm-level emissions intensity across the baseline difference-in-differences, matching, and firm fixed-effects specifications. The estimated SBTi coefficients correspond to an approximately 25–28% lower emissions intensity, depending on the specification. EU ETS exposure is associated with a smaller reduction of approximately 7%. The negative SBTi × EU ETS interaction indicates an additional but modest reduction among firms exposed to both mechanisms, supporting a complementary rather than substitutive relationship. The placebo estimate is statistically insignificant, and the negative SBTi association remains present in both ETS and non-ETS subsamples. However, significant pre-adoption differences in the event-study analysis limit strong causal interpretation; the results are therefore presented as robust comparative associations rather than definitive causal effects.
The sample is limited to European firms with available emissions and financial disclosures, which may reduce generalizability and tilt the sample toward larger and more transparent firms. Although the design combines multiple quasi-experimental tools, unobserved differences in firms' climate strategies cannot be ruled out fully.
The findings suggest that hybrid climate governance may be more strongly associated with lower emission intensity when voluntary commitments and regulatory mechanisms operate together. Firms and policymakers may achieve stronger decarbonization outcomes when science-based target setting is embedded within broader regulatory, governance and accountability structures.
The study adds firm-level evidence on how voluntary climate commitments and carbon-pricing exposure operate separately and jointly in shaping corporate decarbonization. By comparing SBTi and EU ETS within a unified empirical framework, it offers an integrated perspective on climate governance relevant to SDG 13 and post-COP30 policy debates.
Shagufta Parveen, Paolo Coccorese, Muhammad Umer· Management of environmental...· 0 citations
This study investigates how Environmental, Social, and Governance Uncertainty (ESGU) relates to carbon intensity across 24 economies observed annually from 2003 to 2024, a question situated at the intersection of Sustainable Development Goals 7 and 13. ESG‐related uncertainty has been studied mainly in financial markets, yet whether it shapes aggregate decarbonization outcomes and through which channel has remained largely unexamined. The empirical design combines two‐way fixed‐effects regressions with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, a formal mediation test based on Sobel statistics and bias‐corrected bootstrap intervals, and a cross‐sectionally augmented ARDL specification that separates long‐run from short‐run dynamics. Carbon intensity, the renewable electricity share, and the ESGU index are compiled from openly accessible databases, and every series is documented at source to support replication. The estimates indicate that sustainability policy uncertainty is associated with carbon intensity primarily through the energy‐transition channel rather than through a direct effect. Higher ESGU coincides with a larger renewable electricity share (
a
= 0.188,
p
< 0.10), and a larger renewable share is in turn associated with lower carbon intensity (
b
= −0.168,
p
< 0.01); the resulting indirect path is statistically robust (Sobel
z
= −3.46,
p
= 0.001; bootstrap 95% CI [−0.048, −0.016]) and accounts for roughly 47% of the total association. Renewable capacity does not significantly moderate the relationship, whereas trade openness does, and the direction of these conditioning effects departs from prior expectations grounded in firm‐level evidence. By moving ESGU analysis from financial markets to economy‐wide decarbonization and by isolating renewable electricity as the operative transmission mechanism, the study reframes regulatory predictability and clean‐energy deployment as complementary rather than competing instruments for SDG 7 and SDG 13.
H. Tutar, Dalia Štreimikienė· Sustainable Development· 0 citations
Aggregate emission reductions can conceal a redistribution of climate-policy burdens across sectors. This study reanalyses published EU27 Kaya indices and sectoral emission shares for 1990-2022 to ask whether economic-environmental decoupling has been accompanied by a shift toward harder-to-abate activities. The extension introduces five complementary indicators: log-change contribution accounting, mitigation-to-growth leverage, decoupling elasticity, a sectoral reallocation index, and concentration and entropy measures. Per-capita GDP increased by 44.6%, while the combined effects of lower energy and carbon intensity outweighed the scale effect by a factor of 2.50. Per-capita CO₂ emissions consequently fell by 42.5%. At the same time, 20 percentage points of the emissions distribution were reallocated among sectors. Transport, residential, and agriculture/waste increased their combined share from 31% to 51%, while the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index fell from 0.289 to 0.237, indicating a more dispersed and institutionally complex mitigation burden. The findings show that successful aggregate decoupling does not eliminate sectoral lock-in. EU climate policy must preserve power-sector momentum while strengthening coordinated, sector-specific instruments for mobility, buildings, industry, and non-CO₂ agricultural emissions.
H. Tutar, Dilek Baykal· Transformations and Sustaina...· 0 citations
Carbon pricing mechanisms are central policy instruments for climate mitigation. This study assesses the comparative environmental effectiveness of carbon tax (CT) and emissions trading system (ETS), using a panel dataset of 74 countries over the period 2010–2022 under a fixed-effects estimation framework. We found that when effective policy intensity was measured using both price levels and sectoral scope, CT and ETS achieved statistically equivalent emission reductions: a US$10 per tCO
2
e increase in coverage-adjusted carbon price reduced per-capita GHG emissions by approximately 1.31%. This equivalence was obscured when nominal prices were used, as CT performed better than ETS in most specifications; however, this effectiveness attenuated significantly with the inclusion of year fixed effects, indicating that observed emission reductions in CT-adopting countries partly reflected global trends rather than the tax itself. ETS coefficients remained robust across specifications, reflecting stronger identification from idiosyncratic market-driven price variation. Dynamic analysis revealed that CT induced delayed but durable emission reductions, consistent with gradual structural adjustments, while ETS produced more immediate responses. The findings suggest that policymakers should prioritize coverage expansion and adequate price levels for effective policy intensity, adapt policy design to institutional capacity, and complement carbon pricing with renewable energy deployment.
Bao-Linh Tran, Yun-Ju Huang, Wei-Chun Tseng et al.· Energy & Environment· 0 citations
This study examines the vulnerability of India’s energy-intensive and trade-exposed (EITE) industries to the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and evaluates whether a domestic emissions trading system (ETS) can mitigate these risks. Using data from the Annual Survey of Industries for 2015 to 2022, we estimate sector-level marginal abatement costs (MACs) using a stochastic frontier translog hyperbolic distance function. Results indicate a decline in technical efficiency over time and substantial heterogeneity in abatement costs across industries, with shadow prices ranging from USD 54.8/tCO
2
in cement to USD 453.9/tCO
2
in coke ovens (average: USD 238.3/tCO
2
). MACs are negatively associated with carbon intensity, although formal tests provide limited evidence of a statistically significant non-linear relationship. Projected MACs remain relatively stable through 2030 under alternative decarbonization pathways. To assess trade-related risks, we construct a composite CBAM vulnerability index using carbon intensity, trade exposure, and economic dependence. Aluminium emerges as the most vulnerable sector, followed by iron and steel, while cement and chemicals exhibit comparatively limited exposure. ETS simulations indicate that low-cost sectors become permit suppliers as carbon prices increase. The findings suggest that a well-designed domestic carbon market, complemented by targeted support for vulnerable industries, can lower the overall cost of decarbonization, strengthen competitiveness, and enhance resilience to emerging carbon-related trade measures.
JEL Classification:
Q52, Pollution Control Adoption and Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects; Q54, Climate; Natural Disasters and Their Management; Global Warming; Q58, Environmental Economics: Government Policy
Cheshta Grover, Ram Ranjan· Energy Journal· 0 citations