Financial performance in relation to carbon dioxide emissions, a regression analysis of companies in the stock index OMXS30

Abstract: One of the biggest topics of discussion in the last decade has been the climate change and the related global warming. This has rightfully contributed to people being more aware than ever about how to live a more sustainable life and to some extension know how they should act in their everyday life in order to reduce their carbon footprint. These are maybe the most important actions one could take in order to secure a healthy planet for generations to come. What is less known is how to invest in a sustainable way and how to understand if companies are operating sustainably. This thesis aims to solve this problem, enabling people to make more sustainable investment decisions through quickly analyzing the investment target’s financial performance. The result of the thesis is a model that can partly help investors to understand if a company is operating in a sustainable manner. The findings are that ROA, short for return on assets, is the most influential financial performance metric to look at when analyzing a company’s sustainable performance. Unfortunately, the model produced and suggested in this thesis can only explain 15.4% of the CO2 emissions produced by a company. That being said, there is still much to learn about how companies