Corporate climate performance is often discussed in terms of technology, energy systems and regulation. A new international study suggests that the structure and functioning of company boards may also matter. Across 972 listed non-financial firms in the United States, China, Germany, Japan and India, researchers found that several governance characteristics were associated with lower operational carbon emissions intensity between 2020 and 2024.
The clearest patterns involved board independence, gender diversity, meeting frequency and separation of the chief executive and board chair roles. Firms with more independent and gender-diverse boards tended to have lower carbon intensity, while CEO duality was associated with higher carbon intensity. Board size itself did not show a robust beneficial relationship.
The findings, published in Discover Sustainability on 1 October 2026, add cross-country evidence to a debate that has often relied on single-country samples or broader environmental disclosure measures. They do not prove that changing a board will directly cause emissions to fall, but they indicate that governance arrangements may be part of the institutional machinery through which firms oversee climate-related decisions.
A five-country panel of major listed firms
Sunaina Kanojia, Shweta Jain Goel and Neelam Jhawar assembled a balanced panel from major stock-market indices in the world’s five largest economies by GDP. The final sample contained 972 firms observed in every year from 2020 through 2024, producing 4,860 firm-year observations.
The country composition was uneven but broad: 352 firms were from the United States, 290 from Japan, 181 from China, 119 from India and 30 from Germany. Corporate governance, firm characteristics and emissions information came from Bloomberg, while country-level macroeconomic data came from the World Bank.
The researchers focused on six governance characteristics: board size, the proportion of independent directors, annual board meeting frequency, the proportion of women directors, whether the same person served as both CEO and board chair, and whether the firm had a board-level environmental or related committee.
Carbon performance was measured using carbon emissions intensity, calculated from combined Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions relative to total sales. Lower intensity therefore represented better carbon performance. Scope 3 emissions were excluded because reporting and estimation practices remain less consistent across firms and countries.
The typical board was large, mostly independent and still predominantly male
The descriptive data show considerable variation in both governance and emissions. Average carbon intensity was 133.164, with a standard deviation of 506.974 and values ranging from zero to 6,892.099. This wide spread illustrates how different the firms were in their operational emissions relative to sales.
Boards averaged 10.52 directors and met 10.31 times a year. Independent directors represented 59.03% of board membership on average. Women represented 19.94% of directors, although the range extended from no female directors to 66.67% female representation. CEO duality was present in 40.9% of observations, while 45.2% had an environmental or related board committee.
Simple correlations already pointed toward governance differences. Carbon intensity was negatively correlated with board independence, board meeting frequency, gender diversity and environmental committee presence. The researchers then used panel regression methods to examine whether those patterns remained after accounting for other factors.
Board independence showed one of the clearest associations
Diagnostic tests detected heteroskedasticity, serial correlation and cross-sectional dependence, meaning conventional panel inference could be misleading. The primary model therefore used firm fixed effects with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors, allowing the analysis to focus on changes within firms over time while using standard errors designed to be robust to these complications.
In the fully adjusted fixed-effects model, board independence had a coefficient of -1.096. The authors interpret this as a 10 percentage-point increase in board independence being associated with an estimated 10.96-unit reduction in carbon intensity, holding the other included variables constant. The association was statistically significant at the 1% level.
Gender diversity was also negatively associated with carbon intensity. Its coefficient was -0.579 and statistically significant at the 5% level. This suggests that, within the model and measurement scale used, greater representation of women on boards coincided with better operational carbon performance.
Meeting frequency showed a smaller and less statistically secure association. One additional board meeting per year was associated with a 1.179-unit reduction in carbon intensity, significant at the 10% level. The result is consistent with the possibility that more frequent board engagement gives directors additional opportunities to monitor environmental risks and corporate responses, although meeting frequency alone cannot reveal the quality or content of those discussions.
Combining the CEO and chair roles was associated with higher carbon intensity
CEO duality moved in the opposite direction. Firms in which the CEO also served as board chair had carbon intensity estimated to be 23.372 units higher in the adjusted fixed-effects model. The coefficient was statistically significant at the 1% level.
The finding fits agency-based arguments that separating executive management from board leadership can strengthen oversight. In climate governance, that separation may matter because carbon-reduction investments can involve costs today in exchange for regulatory, operational or reputational benefits that emerge over longer horizons. The statistical association, however, does not establish that CEO duality itself produces higher emissions.
Board size was not significantly associated with better carbon performance in the main fixed-effects model. That distinction is important. The results suggest that how a board is composed and functions may be more informative than simply how many directors sit on it.
Environmental committees produced a more complicated result
The presence of an environmental or related committee was associated with 13.069 units lower carbon intensity in the main adjusted fixed-effects model and was statistically significant there. But this result did not survive all robustness checks.
When the researchers used pooled ordinary least squares with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors and country, industry and year controls, environmental committee presence was not significantly associated with lower intensity. It was also positive and statistically insignificant in the two-stage least squares analysis. The authors therefore treat the environmental committee result as specification-dependent rather than as a uniformly robust finding.
That nuance has practical significance. Merely creating a committee may not be enough. Its expertise, authority, independence and actual involvement in environmental decision-making could determine whether the structure changes corporate behaviour.
Robustness checks largely preserved the central pattern
The primary adjusted fixed-effects model explained 22.17% of the variation in carbon intensity. A pooled model with additional country, industry and year controls produced broadly similar findings and an R-squared of 20.69%.
The researchers also attempted to address potential endogeneity using two-stage least squares. All six governance measures were treated as endogenous and instrumented with their one-year lagged values. Because lagged values were unavailable for the first year, this analysis used 3,888 observations rather than 4,860. The first-stage F statistics ranged from 76.74 to 362.12, comfortably above the conventional threshold of 10 for instrument relevance.
Most of the central governance relationships retained the same direction in this analysis. Board independence, gender diversity and meeting frequency remained negatively associated with carbon intensity, while CEO duality remained positively associated. The environmental committee result again failed to show a significant improvement.
Why governance may matter for corporate decarbonisation
The study draws on stakeholder, legitimacy and agency theories. Each offers a different mechanism. Independent directors may monitor management more effectively. A more diverse board may bring a wider range of perspectives to environmental risk. More frequent meetings may increase the attention available for complex climate issues. Separating the CEO and chair roles may reduce concentration of authority and strengthen accountability.
For regulators, the results suggest that climate policy and corporate governance need not be treated as separate domains. Rules affecting board independence, leadership structure and accountability may interact with environmental performance. For investors, governance characteristics may provide additional information about how seriously a company can oversee carbon-management commitments rather than merely disclose them.
The international sample is particularly useful because the five countries differ substantially in corporate governance and climate regulation. At the same time, those institutional differences make simple universal prescriptions difficult. A governance mechanism that works well under one legal or regulatory system may operate differently elsewhere.
The study does not establish causation
Several limitations matter when interpreting the findings. First, this is an observational panel study. Fixed effects and instrumental-variable methods can reduce some sources of bias, but they cannot guarantee that the governance characteristics caused the observed emissions differences.
The instrumental-variable strategy also has an explicit limitation. Each governance variable was instrumented with its own one-year lag, creating exactly identified models. The assumption that lagged governance affects current carbon intensity only through current governance cannot be directly tested with an overidentification test.
Second, carbon performance covered Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions but not Scope 3 value-chain emissions. For companies whose largest climate footprint sits in suppliers, product use or other value-chain activities, operational intensity may provide only a partial picture.
Third, the study examined a defined set of board characteristics and did not capture potentially important features such as environmental expertise, executive experience, ESG-linked compensation, supply-chain practices or technological change. The five-year observation window is also relatively short for governance reforms whose environmental effects may take years to emerge.
Even with those cautions, the study provides a large and recent cross-country test of a practical proposition: corporate carbon performance may depend partly on who exercises oversight, how authority is distributed and how actively boards engage with the firm’s strategic responsibilities. Decarbonisation is still fundamentally about changing emissions-producing activities, but the institutions that govern those decisions may influence how consistently those changes are pursued.
Source Information
Study: The relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and carbon emissions performance in advanced and emerging economies
Authors: Sunaina Kanojia, Shweta Jain Goel and Neelam Jhawar
Journal: Discover Sustainability
Published: 1 October 2026
DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04883-2
