This study investigates the relationship between corporate governance characteristics and environmental decoupling, that is, the misalignment between environmental disclosure and environmental performance. We analyze a sample of 728 European companies (3061 firm‐year observations) belonging to 18 industries and 20 different countries from 2017 to 2023. The results show that companies tend not to disclose all the environmental actions implemented, indicating underreporting behavior. The results also reveal that board independence, board gender diversity, and the presence of a CSR committee mostly foster a reduction in environmental decoupling. Furthermore, these corporate governance characteristics are also found to be effective mechanisms in enhancing companies' environmental performance. However, only the presence of a CSR committee has a strong positive effect on the quantity of environmental information disclosed. Although companies tend to underreport environmental data, the level of environmental decoupling decreased in 2023, demonstrating that the introduction of more stringent requirements for environmental disclosure (i.e., the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive 2022/2464/EU) could promote better alignment between sustainability disclosure and performance. The findings provide important recommendations for companies, regulators, and standard setters on how to design and configure the board of directors to align environmental disclosure and performance.

中文翻译：

---

评估董事会特征对环境脱钩的影响：来自欧洲的证据

本研究调查了公司治理特征与环境脱钩之间的关系，即环境披露与环境绩效之间的错位。我们分析了 2017 年至 2023 年间来自 18 个行业和 20 个不同国家的 728 家欧洲公司（3061 个公司年度观察值）的样本。结果表明，公司往往不披露所有实施的环境行动，这表明存在漏报行为。结果还显示，董事会独立性、董事会性别多样性和 CSR 委员会的存在在很大程度上促进了环境脱钩的减少。此外，这些公司治理特征也被发现是提高公司环境绩效的有效机制。然而，只有 CSR 委员会的存在才能对披露的环境信息数量产生强大的积极影响。尽管公司倾向于低报环境数据，但环境脱钩的水平在 2023 年有所下降，这表明引入更严格的环境披露要求（即企业可持续发展报告指令 2022/2464/EU）可以促进可持续发展披露与绩效之间更好地保持一致。这些发现为公司、监管机构和标准制定者提供了关于如何设计和配置董事会以使环境披露和绩效保持一致的重要建议。