New deal for soil pollution prevention and corporate sustainability: evidence from the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan'.

As the top-level design for soil environmental protection in China, the 'Action Plan for Soil Pollution Prevention and Control' (abbreviated as the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan') encourages enterprises to actively engage in soil pollution prevention and control. Diverging from conventional soil pollution control policies, the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan' serves as a protracted working framework for addressing soil pollution in China. Aimed at safeguarding soil environmental quality through institutional means and rigorously curbing new pollution, this plan inherently prioritizes prevention over remediation. This fundamental orientation may yield divergent conclusions in micro-level studies that assess the sustainable remediation effects of the plan. To evaluate the implementation effect of the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan,' this study took the A-share enterprises under key soil pollution supervision from 2013 to 2020 as samples and used the difference-in-differences model (DID) to examine the effect and mechanisms of the plan on corporate sustainability. The study found that the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan' significantly promoted corporate sustainability, attributable to the risk management principles embedded in these measures. However, this promoting effect could be subject to the reverse adjustment of the regional industrial structure level. In areas where the proportion of the tertiary industry was higher, the promoting effect of the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan' on corporate sustainability was more limited. Further research showed that the local government's land finance mechanism and the enterprises' cash defense mechanism were important channels through which the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan' played a facilitating role, and this role in promoting corporate sustainability was more significant in state-owned enterprises, large-scale enterprises, and regions under stronger environmental regulations. This study, adopting the perspective of corporate sustainability, serves as a supplement to existing research on the implementation effects of the '10-Chapter Soil Pollution Action Plan.' It highlights the pivotal role of high polluting enterprises in the field of soil pollution prevention and control. The study provides empirical evidence for the formation of a soil pollution prevention and control system that is led by the government and requires corporate responsibility. Additionally, it points out the direction for strengthening corporate responsibility identification and soil pollution control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]