Unlocking circular business model avenues to achieve net-zero emissions: a model-driven approach grounded on inter-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets

The imminent climate catastrophe is an immediately relevant area of study in light of the need to address environmental concerns for the survival of humanity on Earth. In this context, the decarbonization paradigm has become a topic of interest among academics, politicians, and legislators for its emerging potential to improve environmental safety and to secure hassle-free human existence. Despite its popularity, regulating emissions is a difficult not only for the society but also for enterprises and governmental bodies. The rationale is that its implementation faces various ambiguous obstacles and barriers. Along with this, emissions in the supply chain that are placed in scope 3 emissions, are substantially harder to abate emissions. With this context, this work offers a detailed discussion on decarbonization barriers to limit its ambiguous environment taking the case of the rubber industrial sector, and thus addresses vital principal barriers under four major categories, keeping SC and industrial activities as a requisite focus. Additionally, the circular economy based circular business model (CBM) has been presented as a savior in this context and with this crucial CBM avenues are underlined. To recognize the impact of CBM on decarbonization barriers a hierarchical model connecting the two has been presented, which is then analyzed through a hybrid approach of AHP (analytic hierarchy process) and EDAS (evaluation based on distance from average solution) based on inter-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs) grounded on experts' input. The outcomes of the analysis infer that PB41 (supply chain tracking complexity) under the major category MB4 (supply chain barriers) comes out to be the most influential barriers while CBM avenue AV6 (digitalized supply chain) has emerged as a promising solution measure. The findings of the study would facilitate the managers and policy makers to interpret the challenging issues of net-zero campaigns and empower them to plan future actions in the umbrella of approaches regulated by CBM.