**1. Introduction**

Resources, environment and population are the three major problems that human society is facing, especially the environmental problem, which is posing a serious threat to human survival and development [1–3]. Since economic reform and opening up, China has made historic achievements in development, but also accumulated a large number of ecological and environmental problems; environmental pollution is on the rise, and the discharge of major pollutants is still serious, which has become a weakness in allround well-off society [4]. In the new historical situation and background, the Chinese government is also positively changing its style of ruling, practicing green concept and actively carrying out the practice of building energy conservation and emissions reduction.

**Citation:** Li, S.; Wang, Y.; Zheng, Y.; Geng, J.; Zhu, J. Research on Energy Saving and Environmental Protection Management Evaluation of Listed Companies in Energy Industry Based on Portfolio Weight Cloud Model. *Energies* **2022**, *15*, 4311. https:// doi.org/10.3390/en15124311

Academic Editors: Antonio Cano-Ortega, Francisco Sánchez-Sutil and Aurora Gil-de-Castro

Received: 11 May 2022 Accepted: 4 June 2022 Published: 13 June 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

The Chinese government has introduced the "12th five-year plan for energy conservation and emissions reduction ", "13th Five-Year plan for energy conservation and emission reduction comprehensive work plan" and "the evaluation index system of ecological civilization construction" among other laws and regulations and clearly points to "vigorously developing the circulation economy", "the implementation of energy conservation and emissions reduction project", "strengthen the main pollutant emission reduction", etc., and putting forward "strive to achieve carbon dioxide emissions peak before 2030, per unit of GDP carbon dioxide emissions lower than in 2005 by more than 65%, strive to become carbon neutral before 2060" and other "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality" targets and specific indicators. In the face of energy conservation and environmental protection related indicators and enterprise sustainable development strategy demand, many enterprises, especially the energy industry (the main waste water, waste gas, solid waste emissions units) have implemented a series of energy conservation and emissions reduction environmental protection measures (hereinafter referred to as energy saving and environmental protection, ESEP) management measures [5,6]. However, developing these projects has became the burden of the enterprise to a certain extent, which leads to less attention being paid, limited implementation, limited investment and other phenomena. In this context, it has become an important topic to fully understand the implementation of ESEP management in energy industry enterprises, to mobilize enterprises to carry out ESEP management actively, and improve the weak links of enterprises' ESEP management.

Some institutions, organizations and scholars have actively explored the issues of energy saving and environmental protection from different perspectives. Current research mainly focuses on the influencing factors on energy saving and emission reduction [7,8], policies [9,10], efficiency [11,12], and environmental performance evaluation [13,14]. In terms of energy saving and emission reduction efficiency evaluation and environmental performance evaluation, scholars have mainly constructed an evaluation index system from the perspective of product life cycle, sustainable development, input-output and pressure-response framework. For example, Wu and Chen (2014), on the basis of analyzing the content of the whole-process environmental management, established an index system for the performance evaluation of the whole-process of the environmental management of the enterprise, which involves various activities and links between the whole process of the enterprise, including green procurement, ecological design, cleaner production, green transportation, green sales, green use and the construction of green corporate culture [15]. Xue et al. (2022) established a comprehensive evaluation framework based on life cycle assessment and the protection supply curve to evaluate the benefits of energy saving and emission reduction [16]. Wei et al. (2018) constructed an urban environmental performance evaluation indicator system from the four aspects of environmental health, ecological protection, environmental governance and sustainable utilization of resources and energy based on the "driving-pressure-state-impact-response (DPSIR)" model [17]. Li et al. (2019) focus on green behaviors of enterprises and constructed an evaluation index system of green governance from four aspects: green governance framework, green governance mechanism, green governance efficiency and green governance responsibility [18]. The strategies of energy enterprises are very important to their existence and development [19]. Although these studies have carried out a comprehensive evaluation on all aspects of ESEP, they focus more on evaluation research from the perspective of performance, and the measurement of management performance related to ESEP still heavily relies on lagging indicators such as energy consumption, pollutant emission and resource recycling. There is still a lack of systematic and comprehensive evaluation of the ESEP management status of energy industry enterprises from the perspective of management.

In terms of the measurement and evaluation methods of regional energy conservation and environmental protection, most studies adopt qualitative or semi-qualitative methods such as the expert scoring method, questionnaire survey method, analytic hierarchy process and life cycle assessment, etc. [19,20]. The Cloud model is a new evaluation method especially studying compound uncertainty proposed by Li et al. [21]. Compared with

traditional assessment methods, cloud model evaluation methods can better describe the randomness and fuzziness of evaluation objects or variables (e.g., judge whether a variable is closer to 2 or to 3 when its primary experimental value is 2.5), and realize the mapping and conversion between qualitative and quantitative uncertainty, which has been widely applied to sustainability assessment, risk assessment and many other fields [22,23]. Based on this, this study constructs the integration of an assessment framework including "governance framework, implementation process, governance effectiveness", and uses the combination weighting method of the cloud model to evaluate the ESEP management ability of listed companies in the energy industry, in order to clarify the present situation of ESEP disclosure, the ESEP management situation and ESEP weak links, investigating ESEP benchmark enterprises and key indicators in various industries, and then putting forward countermeasures and suggestions for improving and strengthening ESEP relevant work.

The innovations of this study are as follows: (1) Focusing on listed companies in the energy industry, the ESEP management evaluation system based on the evaluation framework of "governance framework, implementation process, governance effectiveness" is constructed, which enriches the research on ESEP management evaluation; (2) Combine with the information disclosure measurement method, establish the qualitative index rating basis, and collect the evaluation index data information based on the ESEP information disclosed by listed companies, further enriching the relevant research on ESEP management evaluation; (3) The cloud model theory is applied to ESEP management evaluation, and a management evaluation model based on combination weight-cloud evaluation is constructed, which can provide guidance for ESEP management evaluation research.

#### **2. Methods**

#### *2.1. Construction of Evaluation Index System*

Although some studies have carried out a comprehensive evaluation of enterprise's ESEP management, these studies focus more on evaluation research from the perspective of performance, and the measurement of management performance related to ESEP still heavily relies on lagging indicators such as energy consumption, pollutant emission and resource recycling. There is still a lack of systematic and comprehensive evaluation of ESEP management status of energy industry enterprises from the perspective of management. By reading a large number of relevant laws and regulations and relevant literature, combined with the actual situation of the energy industry and following the principles of scientific, systematic, comparable and operable index design, this study constructs an ESEP management evaluation index system for listed companies in the energy industry. The system is divided into three layers: (1) The target layer is ESEP comprehensive evaluation of listed companies in the energy industry; (2) The criterion layer is divided into four categories: governance framework, implementation process, governance effectiveness, and others; (3) The index layer is composed of 20 first-level indicators reflecting "governance framework, implementation process, governance effectiveness, public welfare, etc.", and calculation and evaluation instructions are provided under each indicator (see Table 1). These indicators can reflect the performance of enterprises in energy saving and environmental management in a comprehensive and systematic way, and the indicators are described below.


**Table 1.** Energy saving and

environmental

 protection (ESEP)

management

 evaluation index system of listed companies in the energy industry.

(1) Governance framework: A reasonable governance framework can determine the vision, culture, strategy and system of a company's ESEP from the top design level, which is the basis and key to improving a company's ESEP level and sustainable development. Tian et al. (2015) believe that forward-looking environmental strategy can effectively promote enterprise green innovation, enhance enterprise green image and improve enterprise environmental performance [24]. Liao et al. (2015) propose that establishing a social responsibility committee, an environmental protection committee and other organizations to coordinate stakeholder relations can improve corporate social responsibility performance [25]. Baboukardos (2018) emphasizes the importance of environmental clauses and points out that companies with recognized environmental clauses would help investors clarify the future economic benefits and costs related to the company's environmental performance by sending signals of strong future financial performance or improving the reliability of environmental performance information [26]. Therefore, this study believes that the ESEP management system should cover the dimension of governance framework, and sets up indicators such as C1-SEP institutional system, C2-ESEP management system, C3-ESEP management culture, and C4-ESEP clauses and policies to evaluate the governance framework.

(2) Implementation process: Greening production and operation activities of enterprises is an important link to improving ESEP management level and sustainable development ability. For example, Wu and Chen (2014) believe that effective prevention and control measures should be adopted to carry out environmental management across the whole process of procurement, design, production, transportation, sales and use [15]. Du (2013) believes that source management (clean production) and process control (improving resource efficiency) are the key points in the construction of a "environment-friendly and resource-conserving society" [27]. Therefore, this study suggests this dimension of the ESEP management system should cover the implementation process, and has set up C5-clean production management, C6-pollution reduction management, C7-recycling management, C8-energy efficiency improvement management, C9-tackling climate change management, C10-environmental protection management, C11-green office management and other indicators to evaluate the implementation situation.

(3) Governance efficiency: the ESEP governance efficiency index mainly reflects the situation of enterprises in energy conservation, "three wastes" emission reduction, resource recycling and waste reuse, which can intuitively measure the performance of enterprises from environmental aspects. Some scholars also introduced these indicators in their studies to measure the environmental performance of enterprises. For example, Qin et al. (2004) synthesize the emission indexes of important pollution factors such as SO2, NOX and COD into a comprehensive index to express the environmental performance of enterprises [28]. Hao et al. (2014) use CO2 emissions as a proxy variable to study the environmental impact of industrial enterprises [29]. Wang et al. (2018) select R&D investment per unit energy consumption to measure the level of green innovation of enterprises [30]. Therefore, this study believes that it is necessary to incorporate the dimension of governance effectiveness into the ESEP evaluation system. Specifically, it includes C12-environmental pollution events, C13-discharge of three wastes, C14-energy consumption situation, C15-resource recycling, C16-other greenhouse emissions, C17-ecological environment construction, C18-ESEP influence, and C19-ESEP special investment index.

(4) Others: The setting of other dimensions is mainly to measure the participation of enterprises in environmental public welfare activities. Wang et al. (2015) point out that enterprises' active participation in environmental protection and public welfare can convey signals of enterprises' green governance status to investors on the one hand, and objectively reflect the implementation status of enterprises' environmental management on the other hand. Therefore, in this study, some factors of ESG related evaluation are used for reference, and ESEP public welfare and other dimensions are incorporated into the ESEP evaluation system, so as to comprehensively measure the performance of enterprises in external environmental public welfare and other aspects.
