Can Companies Reduce Carbon Emission Intensity to Enhance Sustainability?

With the rapid development of global industrialization and modernization, carbon emissions have brought about serious climate warming and environmental pollution problems. Chinese enterprises, as the major players in carbon emissions, are important in terms of promoting the green transformation of the economy. It is particularly important to investigate the relationship and mechanism of action between carbon emission reduction and corporate sustainable development in Chinese enterprises. This study aims to determine whether reducing the intensity of carbon emissions can make businesses more sustainable and to analyze the moderating influences of government environmental subsidies, media monitoring, and executives' green opinions on the link between the two variables. The study sample consists of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares data from 2015 to 2020, and a fixed-effects model is employed for analysis. Data were obtained from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research database, the Financial News Database of Listed Companies, and enterprise financial statement notes, etc. Stata17.0 was used to clean and analyze the data. The results indicate that businesses can greatly improve their long-term viability by lowering their carbon emissions. Additionally, government environmental subsidies, media monitoring, and executives' green perceptions all enhance the correlation between corporate sustainability and reduce carbon emission intensity. This study not only enriches the relationship between environmental governance and sustainable development from a theoretical perspective, but also further expands the stakeholder theory. It also finds the mechanism of the role of the government and media on corporate carbon emissions for sustainable development in practice, which provides effective guidance to accelerate the promotion of carbon emission reduction and, thus, the sustainable development of Chinese enterprises.