Quality evaluation of carbon information disclosure of public companies in China's electric power sector based on ANP-Cloud model

Abstract

Chinese electric power sector (EPS) contributes 52% of China's total CO2 emissions. Given the severe global warming situation, carbon information disclosed by Chinese electric power enterprises (EPEs) has received extensive attention. Therefore, to understand the current level of carbon information disclosure (CID) in EPS and improve the CID quality, this paper evaluates the CID quality of public companies in the EPS. Based on the characteristics of the EPEs, this paper established a CID quality evaluation system from five aspects: integrity, relevance, reliability, comprehensibility, and comparability. An ANP-Cloud model is employed to evaluate the CID quality of 62 public companies in China's EPS. The analytic network process (ANP) method can quantify the correlation among evaluation indexes. The Cloud model achieves the transformation from qualitative evaluation to quantitative scoring with consideration of the uncertainty and fuzziness of the expert's evaluation language. The integration of two models, therefore, improves the comprehensiveness and objectiveness of the evaluation results. The evaluation results indicate that: (1) “Carbon emissions”, “Carbon emission reduction targets” and “Independent chapter” indexes disclosed by the EPEs have a significant impact on CID quality. (2) The CID quality of the entire EPS public companies is low. The carbon information disclosed by EPEs cannot effectively represent the carbon management behavior of enterprises. (3) From the internal perspective of the EPS, the CID quality of thermal enterprises is relatively high, while hydropower enterprises are relatively low. Finally, this paper proposes viable suggestions to improve the CID quality from three aspects: EPEs, government, and public monitoring.