Mapping the way to a dark green enterprise: fuzzy cognitive map based analysis of factors affecting environmental performance for sustainable development

Purpose

It is crucial to transform current enterprises to greener versions of them to reach the sustainable development goals. The first step of this transformation can be understanding comprehensively environmental performances of enterprises. This study presents a practical analysis for evaluation of factors affecting environmental performance of enterprises to call them as a “dark green.”

Design/methodology/approach

For this purpose, a detailed factor search was primarily performed and then the weights of them on environmental performance of the enterprises to support sustainable development were analyzed using fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) that incorporates the casual relationships between factors and represents the dynamics of the complex systems. The FCM was also supported with extended great deluge algorithm (EGDA), which is an evolutionary algorithm with high performance to increase robustness of the study.

Findings

The findings indicated that the most influential factors on environmental performance of an activist enterprise are “loyalty to regulations,” “digitalization level,” “tendency to produce environmentally friendly products/services,” “productivity efforts” and “fossil fuel consumption,” respectively. While the first four of them affect the environmental performance positively, fossil fuel consumption affects it negatively.

Practical implications

The results of this study can help companies to prioritize the critical points for their environmental perspectives, observe at which factors they are good or lacking and find where to start improvement.

Originality/value

This study is one of the pioneering studies to investigate the importance of criteria for a dark green business, considering 21 factors from different sources to make a detailed representation of corporate environmental sustainability.