Environmental Performance Over Time: A Cross-Industry Comparison of Environmental Improvement
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2025-07-03
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en
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This thesis examines whether environmental performance has improved over time and whether high-emission industries have demonstrated greater improvement than low-emission industries. Using raw environmental data from the LSEG database, a new composite environmental score was constructed through Principal Component Analysis (PCA), enabling absolute comparisons over time and across sectors.
The results show statistically and substantively significant improvements in environmental performance in 2022 and 2023, confirming a trend of delayed improvement. High-emission industries improved more than low-emission industries in 2021 and 2022, but this effect was not consistent across all years and did not hold under all robustness checks.
This study contributes by addressing key methodological flaws in ESG research, especially the limitations of rank-based scores. It offers a replicable, indicator-based method to measure real environmental progress. While the results indicate meaningful improvements, they also reveal that performance gains are uneven and often context-specific.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen