Sustainability, emission trading system and carbon leakage: An approach based on neural networks and multicriteria analysis

Two transitions, green and digital, are changing the operations and strategies of industrial systems. At the same time, businesses are challenged to be globally competitive. Europe has a very ambitious agenda as it aims to be the first climate-neutral continent in 2050. The european emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) has proven to have facilitated the reduction of significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, but the risk of carbon leakage is present. This work seeks to explore these issues and their relationships. Through the use of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, a model is built to determine the price of european union allowance (EUA) as a function of different financial energy futures. The results show that the model is very robust and the EUA tends to vary between 78 and 91 €/tCO2. In addition, a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is applied to identify the best policy alternatives to enable businesses subject to the EU ETS to be competitive in global markets. The analysis is carried out with the help of academic and industrial experts and it emerges that the criteria considered most relevant are two: (i) public expenditure and its expected benefits and (ii) the industrial ecosystem. The policy implications identify that bonuses should be provided to businesses for innovative solutions that protect both the energy and raw material components. The framework of the 3E (Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy, and Circular Economy) are critical to businesses' long-term strategies, flanked by digital development. © 2023 The Author(s)