The transition towards cleaner transportation and logistics unfolds in an energy environment characterised by substantial uncertainty. This study examines how global energy-related uncertainty relates to corporate sustainability performance and how firm- and country-level conditions shape this relationship. Drawing on real-options reasoning and a multilevel perspective, the analysis uses 1692 firm-year observations from 211 listed transportation and logistics firms across 39 countries during 2012–2023. Firm fixed-effects estimates show that greater global energy-related uncertainty is associated with weaker subsequent ESG performance, although this relationship varies across firms, national contexts and ESG dimensions. At the firm level, cash holdings, short-term liquidity and financial distress exhibit distinct moderating patterns, with the strongest conditional evidence associated with cash holdings. At the country level, adaptation readiness is associated with a less adverse ESG response to heightened energy uncertainty, whereas climate vulnerability exhibits the opposite moderating pattern. Pillar-level analyses show that cash-related heterogeneity extends across environmental, social and governance performance, while the moderating role of national readiness differs across ESG dimensions. Additional environmental-outcome tests associate the GlobalEUI–cash interaction with lower emissions-performance scores and greater CO₂-intensity growth. These findings extend cleaner-logistics research by identifying how corporate financial conditions and national transition environments shape sustainability responses to global energy uncertainty, while highlighting the distinction between broad ESG performance and emissions-related outcomes.
National carbon neutrality strategies are assessed using territorial greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, which focuses on emissions occurring within national borders. While this approach is essential for international reporting, it overlooks emissions embedded in global supply chains and coherently ignores non-climate environmental impacts, potentially leading to environmental burden shifting. This study proposes a systemic life cycle assessment (LCA) framework to evaluate national carbon neutrality policies beyond territorial emissions, using the French National Low-Carbon Strategy as a case study.The results show that while the French scenario achieves its decarbonization objective at the territorial level by 2050, life cycle GHG emissions beyond national borders could represent 61% of the total emissions balance (some indirect emissions could be associated with activities carried out in France in previous years). Within France, the main remaining contributors are livestock-related agricultural activities and residual industrial processes. Furthermore, the multicriteria assessment reveals significant environmental trade-offs, notably potentially increased pressures on mineral and metallic resource use, water use, and human toxicity, despite overall improvements in most other impact categories.Beyond quantitative results, this study addresses key methodological challenges associated with applying LCA framework to national policy scenarios, including data granularity mismatches, prospective modelling of emerging technologies, and the management of double counting across sectors. The proposed framework is transferable to other national or regional contexts and provides critical insights for sustainability-oriented decision-making. Overall, the findings highlight the limitations of territorial carbon accounting and emphasize the need for life cycle-based, multicriteria approaches to support robust and globally consistent climate policy assessment.
Agri-food processing drives Thailand's exports but is also a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. This study examines whether digital strategy and environmental, social and governance (ESG) integration raise objectively measured green supply chain efficiency, and whether the two levers are complementary. A non-oriented, variable returns to scale modified slacks-based measure with Scope 1 and 2 emissions as an undesirable output is estimated for listed agri-food firms over 2021 to 2025; because emission disclosure is incomplete, efficiency is obtained for 172 firm-years of 42 firms from a frame of 51 firms. The score, interpreted as focal-firm supply chain eco-efficiency, is modeled with two-step system GMM on 86 firm-years of 33 firms, complemented by pooled, bias-corrected fixed effects, fractional probit, and selection-corrected estimates. Mean efficiency is 0.548. In the system GMM, digital intensity is negatively associated with efficiency (β = −0.677, p = 0.005), while ESG integration and the digital-ESG interaction are not significant. The interaction is nevertheless positive in almost every specification and significant in pooled (β = 0.184, p < 0.001), bias-corrected fixed effects (p < 0.001), and fractional probit (p = 0.037) estimates, and the marginal effect of digital intensity turns positive only at the highest ESG ratings. Productivity growth stems from catching up rather than frontier advance. The evidence is consistent with complementarity, in which digital investment improves eco-efficiency only when directed by strong sustainability integration, although the short panel limits the precision of the dynamic estimates. The study provides replicable frontier evidence from an emerging-market industry.
