Joining multi‐stakeholder initiatives to fight climate change: The environmental impact of corporate participation in the Science Based Targets initiative
研究了企业加入科学碳目标倡议（SBTi）是否真的减少了温室气体排放，发现参与企业比未参与的同类企业排放更低，尤其当企业承诺遵循倡议建议时。
Abstract This study theorizes and empirically tests whether firms' decisions to join multi‐stakeholder initiatives, targeting climate mitigation, lead to improved environmental performance. We focus on firms' participations in the Science Based Targets initiative, a multi‐stakeholder initiative meant to support firms in setting greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets in line with the thresholds defined by the Paris Agreement in 2015. The study hypothesizes that participation reduces firm's concerns about uncertainty and encourages investments in timeous internal climate change activities. We used the coarsened exact matching methodology to create a matched sample of European and North American listed firms participating in the initiative and comparable, non‐participating firms over a 3‐year period from 2015 to 2017. The results showed that firms' participation led to lower levels of GHG emissions compared to similar non‐participating counterparts, especially when they committed to the initiative with the intention to follow the proposed indications.