Under the Chinese strategy of “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality”, Enterprises’ Environmental Information Disclosure (EEID), as one of the important ways for enterprises to achieve low-carbon development, has gained increased attention from the government, media, investors, and other stakeholders. the EEID is not only an important tool for companies to communicate environmental performance to the outside world, but also an effective way for the government to monitor corporate pollution behavior. Its importance is self-evident. However, relevant research shows that 70% of Chinese listed companies had not implemented the EEID in 2020. Also, there are common problems in the disclosure content and the polarization of the disclosure level among the companies that do disclose. These problems weaken the objectivity and practicability of the EEID and have a negative impact on the government’s environmental supervision, the environmental protection demands of the public, and investors’ decision making. This paper takes listed companies in China’s A-share heavily polluting industries as the research sample to solve the optimization problem of the EEID. By adopting a fixed effects model (FEM), this paper empirically studies the impact of three public pressures on the EEID: government environmental regulation, media attention, and institutional investment preference. Based on China’s unique socialist market economic system, this paper innovatively uses environmental policy uncertainty as a moderator variable. This paper examines the limitations of theoretical research on public pressure and environmental information disclosure by studying the impact of local environmental leadership change on the relationship between public pressure and the EEID. The conclusions of this paper reveal the driving mechanism of how stakeholders such as government, media, and institutional investors influence the EEID. At the same time, it expands the application of public pressure theory in environmental information disclosure research by introducing the perspective of environmental policy uncertainty.

Contest between the international or national enterprises stimulates the formation of innovative or improved products or of well-organized processes. Nevertheless, reliance on carbon-based materials and energy emission sources has been highlighted as a primary problem of the 21st century. The current study examines the influence of carbon disclosure information (CDI), media reporting and financial influence on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) by using Shenzhen and Shanghai’s heavy polluting listed industries’ dataset from 2014 to 2019. By applying different data approaches, the estimated results demonstrate that the CDI level is significantly negative related to SOE compared to NSOE. The estimated results explain that media’s positive reporting offsets the additional benefits to stakeholders. While media’s negative reporting negatively influences a firm’s competitive position, it mitigates the stock price and its social value. Our results suggest that external factors are encouraging for the financial values of stakeholders, along with those of enterprises.