The reliability of sustainability reporting can impact sustainable development and should provide relevant information to financial analysts, investors, and other stakeholders by reducing information asymmetry between them and management. Nevertheless, its utility is often undermined by a lack of the disclosure information’s trustability. This paper aims to evaluate if the completeness of the sustainability report’s environmental quantitative information is a reliable indicator of the company’s real commitment to environmental sustainability. The paper analyzes the relationship between the report’s completeness and the environmental performance evaluated by data of an independent third party. Fifty Italian companies that have submitted complete data on CO₂ emissions to the European Union Emissions Trade Scheme (EU ETS) in the six years from 2008–2013 and published sustainability reports have been evaluated. Results indicate that reporting completeness is not correlated with better environmental performance, and consequently with greater commitment to environmental sustainability, thus suggesting the potential existence of credibility gaps.

The agri-food sector is a key actor in the Italian economy and plays a crucial role in rescuing and accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, diverse sustainability challenges including environmental conservation, economic volatility, political changes and regulatory constraints affect the agri-food company’s competitiveness and their ability to face global sustainability challenges. Exploiting digital innovation is then essential. By facilitating more efficient management of resources, reducing waste and improving supply chain transparency, digital innovations contribute to more sustainable, inclusive and resilient agri-food systems. This paper aims to understand the ongoing digital transformation of the Italian agri-food sector through a comparative analysis of innovative practices by Italian agri-food companies that are recognized as sustainability leaders. Among the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies, sensors, blockchain, cyber security, and artificial intelligence appear to be the most adopted I4.0 solutions to help companies influence the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

Public research-funding instruments are central policy tools through which national innovation systems select, reward, and gate access to scientific talent, yet the equity of this process remains poorly understood from a science-policy perspective. Drawing on gendered organization theory and institutional perspectives on national innovation systems, this study examines how apparently neutral excellence criteria embedded in one of Europe’s most prestigious research-funding instruments interact with national policy and socio-economic conditions to shape the geography of scientific talent allocation. The study analyzes women’s representation among European Research Council (ERC) Principal Investigators (PIs) hosted across 30 European countries between 2019 and 2023, across four ERC funding schemes (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Proof of Concept Grants), integrating GIS-based mapping with econometric modeling of Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) dimensions and national innovation-system indicators. The spatial findings reveal that gender asymmetries in ERC funding allocation are deeply uneven across national innovation systems, while the econometric results show that the institutional presence of women PIs differs significantly across funding schemes, with lower average numbers in Advanced and Proof-of-Concept grants than in Starting Grants. Political empowerment and national R&D investment are positively associated with women PIs’ presence, while Economic Participation and Opportunity shows a more complex, policy-relevant association that resists a simple parity narrative. These findings suggest that the efficiency of national innovation systems in mobilizing the full scientific talent pool is unevenly realized across Europe, with implications for research-funding design, national R&D investment strategies, and evaluation criteria. The study offers a replicable spatial-econometric framework for monitoring how competitive research-funding instruments interact with national innovation-system conditions in shaping who leads publicly funded frontier research.