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This study aims to explore how large Australian companies in emission intensive industries perceived the introduction of the Carbon Tax as an approach to carbon emissions regulation and as a tool for accountability. It also investigates the influence of perceptions of the new tax on the internal carbon emissions management practices and the motivations for such actions.

This study draws on transaction cost theory and legitimacy theory to address corporate perceptions, responses and motivations in relation to the Carbon Tax. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 senior managers directly responsible for the carbon emissions management of their companies.

The study found that the Carbon Tax, viewed by the high-emitting companies as a heavy financial burden, had a significant influence on moderating organisational legitimacy seeking behaviours. It is evident that the transaction cost issues in the form of the carbon pricing requirement has led to a change of focus to “management” rather than merely reporting to external stakeholders. This influenced companies to change their behaviour with the potential to internalise previous externalities of carbon pollution.

This research highlights that a pricing signal in emissions regulations is essential in conjunction with external pressures to effectively stimulate emissions management actions in companies. It extends our understanding of legitimacy theory by suggesting that a mandatory pricing mechanism as explained by transaction cost economics has the potential to lead to actual changes in corporate behaviour through a focus on management rather than reporting.

The study highlights the important elements of any effective emissions policy designed to encourage strong emissions management actions from companies. Based on the findings of the study, it is evident that the Carbon Tax was a very effective mechanism in driving emission management actions, despite the general perception that any deficiencies associated with such a price mechanism could have a negative effect on the economy.

Climate change is a critical issue for the modern society and this study discussed a short-lived policy tool in the Australian context that had the potential to change corporate behaviour in relation to carbon management.

This study is among the very few studies that have examined the influence of the Carbon Tax on internal emissions management practices of companies, and therefore, provides a unique dataset of corporate responses to the Carbon Tax. Given the short time frame that the Carbon Tax was in operation, the study enhances our understanding of the influence the Carbon Tax had on companies responsible for high greenhouse gas emissions.

This paper aims to investigate potential impact of internal carbon pricing in emission reduction in Higher education institutions (HEIs). Over the past century, human activities have increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere. If GHG emissions continue their upward trend, this will disturb the natural balance and trigger abrupt changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change would require a substantial and sustained reduction in GHG emissions from all sectors. HEIs, as major emitters, indeed need to respond to the demand to become more sustainable by making practical changes to the way their institution is run.

Using emission data associated with campus waste, this study describes how HEIs can take the lead on emission reduction through the implementation of carbon pricing.

Specifically, this study estimates the cost of emissions from campus waste to illustrate the primary benefits of internal carbon pricing for scaling up campus carbon neutrality initiatives and describes practical implications for enhancing sustainable waste management in a university setting. This study will contribute to identifying the potential for emissions reduction through waste management using a carbon pricing mechanism in university settings.

While carbon pricing has long been regarded as an alternative approach to tackling carbon pollution, it has not been thoroughly explored with regard to waste management.

This study aims to investigate why companies use the internal price of carbon (IPC) for carbon management.

The authors adopt sustainable transition management theory to design the research and explain the findings of empirical models. The sample includes companies that participated in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire survey, derived from 37 countries and regions for the period 2015–2018.

The results first reveal that transition management facilitates an upward adoption trend annually during the study period. Second, the authors find that the proxies for transition management are all correlated with the adoption of the IPC in the predicted direction. Third, the authors identify spatial patterns and driving factors for adoption of the IPC.

This study provides additional insight beyond the limited prior literature in this area. In particular, the findings regarding the influence of physical environment on climate-related decisions have not been documented in extant literature. IPC is expected to interact with and complement external price of carbon for climate change governance. Thus, the exploring results of the paper fill an important gap and pave the way for future study to examine emerging issues in the burgeoning field of carbon accounting for climate change.

This paper aims to review the literature on carbon trading from the perspective of evolution, finds out the evolution path of these literatures and gives out the future research hotspots in this field.

Uses visualization tools (CiteSpace and HistCite) to systematically categorize the literature on carbon-trading schemes in the Web of Science core collection from 1998 to 2018, comprehensively analyzes carbon-trading schemes from four dimensions, namely, discipline evolution, keyword evolution, citation cluster evolution and citation path evolution.

Research on carbon-trading schemes has a specific development and evolution path along four dimensions, namely, in the discipline dimension, the largest change lies in the mathematics pointed to by at least four different disciplines; the keyword evolution dimension shows a gradual deepening emphasis on coordinated development; citation clusters identify three major clusters – carbon prices, China’s carbon trading, carbon market and supply chain; and citation paths identify three major evolutionary paths, the most important of which shows that “What affects carbon price?” has changed to “What is the impact of carbon prices?”

Reveals the evolution path of carbon trading research studies and proposes four possible development directions for carbon-trading scheme research, which is helpful for future carbon trading-related research and serves as a reference for the promotion of and improvements in carbon-trading schemes.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize the three abstract-concrete levels of ontology of strong structuration theory (strong ST) to examine how, and to what extent, was the development of carbon accounting frameworks at the policy, industry, and organizational levels enabled by external structures as conditions of action, that is, what was the nature of active agency within a field of position-practice relations that led to the development of these frameworks.

A case study was undertaken drawing upon interviews that were undertaken between 2008 and 2011 at the industry and organizational levels as well as documentary evidence relating to carbon accounting policy development at the macro, or policy level.

The parliamentary committee hearings into the development of the carbon price legislation represented fields of position-practice relationships which highlighted the interplay of the internal structures, capabilities and the roles of both power and trust of the agent(s)-in-focus. A meso-level analysis of the Victorian water industry highlighted how it was able to mediate the exercise of power by the macro level through the early adoption of carbon accounting frameworks. At the ontic or micro level of the individual water business, the development of a greenhouse strategy was also the outcome of position-practice relationships which highlighted the interplay of the internal structures and dispositions of the agent(s)-in-focus. The position-practice relationships at both the industry and organizational level were characterized by both soft power and trust.

Future research could investigate how the withdrawal of the carbon pricing mechanism in Australia has affected the development of carbon accounting practices whilst overseas research could examine the extent to which carbon accounting frameworks were the outcome of position-practice relationships.

Given the global significance of carbon accounting, this paper provides an overview as to how the early adoption of voluntary carbon accounting practices resulted in a reduction in carbon emissions within the water industry and therefore limited its liability for the carbon price.

This paper illustrates how the strong ST ontological concept of position-practices can be utilized at the macro, meso, and ontic levels and how these relationships mediated the impact of the carbon price upon both the water industry and the individual water business.

The risk management of transitory risk for real assets has gained large interest especially in the past 10 years among researchers as well as market participants. In addition, the recent regulatory tightening in the EU urges financial market participants to disclose sustainability-related financial risk, without providing any methodological guidance. The purpose of the study is the identification and explanation of the methodological limitations in the field of transitory risk modeling and the logic step to advance toward a stochastic approach.

The study reviews the literature on deterministic risk modeling of transitory risk exposure for real estate highlighting the heavy methodological limitations. Based on this, the necessity to model transitory risk stochastically is described. In order to illustrate the stochastic risk modeling of transitory risk, the empirical study uses a Markov Switching Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity model to quantify the carbon price risk exposure of real assets.

The authors find academic as well as regulatory urgency to model sustainability risk stochastically from a conceptual point of view. The own empirical results show the superior goodness of fit of the multiregime Markov Switching Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity in comparison to their single regime peer. Lastly, carbon price risk simulations show the increasing exposure across time.

The practical implication is the motivation of the stochastic modeling of sustainability-related risk factors for real assets to improve the quality of applied risk management for institutional investment managers.

The present study extends the existing literature on sustainability risk for real estate essentially by connecting the transitory risk management of real estate and stochastic risk modeling.

The digital economy is profoundly transforming the manufacturing industry's fundamental concepts and value creation logic, making digital transformation (DT) strategy a crucial decision for manufacturers. And faced with increasingly severe environmental issues, DT may become an important means to achieve sustainable development. This paper mainly discusses the strategic choice of the manufacturer's DT and analyzes the impact of DT on carbon emissions.

Based on the carbon cap-and-trade mechanism, the authors have constructed two decision models to study the DT strategy of the manufacturer, further exploring the impact of the mechanism on the DT strategy and production strategy of the manufacturer. Finally, the authors discussed the effect of manufacturers' DT on their carbon emissions.

The authors found that the manufacturer should initiate DT to enhance their competitiveness, regardless of whether they are in a low digital technology scenario or a high digital technology scenario. Notably, DT can enhance the ability of the manufacturer to respond to external emergencies. In a low digital technology market scenario, both carbon emissions per unit of product and carbon price are positively affecting the digitization level of the manufacturer. In a high digital technology market scenario, the manufacturer will initiate a full degree of DT. Moreover, the impact of DT on total carbon emissions varies in markets with different levels of digital technology.

Innovatively, the authors divided the DT of the manufacturer into market scenarios with low digital technology and high digital technology. Provide the manufacturer with DT decisions according to different scenarios. At the same time, it verifies the uncertainty of DT on carbon emission and enriches the related research.

This study aims to analyse the relationship between countries’ regulatory context and voluntary carbon disclosures. To date, little attention has been paid to how specific climate change-related regulation influences companies’ climate change disclosures, especially voluntary carbon reporting.

The New Institutional Sociology perspective has been adopted to examine the pressure of a country’s climate change regulation on voluntary carbon reporting. This research uses Tobit regression to analyse data from 2,183 companies in 12 countries that were invited to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire in 2015.

The results show that countries’ specific climate change-related regulation does influence both the participation of its companies in the CDP and their quality, as measured by the CDP disclosure score.

The sample is restricted to 12 countries’ regulatory environment. Thus, caution should be exercised when generalising the results to other institutional contexts.

The results are of use to regulators and policymakers to better understand how specific climate change-related regulation influences voluntary carbon disclosure. Investors may also benefit from this research, as it shows which institutional contexts present greater regulatory stringency and how companies in more stringent environments take advantage of synergy to disclose high-quality carbon information.

By linking regulatory and voluntary reporting, this study sheds light on how companies use voluntary carbon reporting to adapt to social expectations generated in their institutional context.

This is the first research that considers specific climate change-related regulation in the study of voluntary carbon disclosures.