Corporate environmental intelligence as an emerging governance framework in digital sustainability: A scoping review

The digitalization of sustainability governance has intensified debates on accountability, equity, and the ethical limits of automation. While artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and data-driven infrastructures promise greater transparency, they also risk reinforcing informational asymmetries and algorithmic bias. Addressing this tension, this scoping review examines how existing scholarship conceptualizes and operationalizes the integration of digital intelligence within corporate environmental governance and, through a structured synthesis, articulates the construct of Corporate Environmental Intelligence (CEI). The review analyzes 38 peer-reviewed empirical studies (2015–2025) across three analytical dimensions: technological integration, institutional structuring, and ethical–societal implications. Rather than treating CEI as an established model, the findings indicate that it can be interpreted as a multi-layer governance configuration linking digital infrastructures (AI, IoT, blockchain, Smart-NbS), monitoring and verification mechanisms (MRV), and justice-oriented safeguards within corporate sustainability systems. Regulatory developments such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and European Sustainability Reporting Standards illustrate how digital transparency and interoperability are increasingly embedded in environmental accountability regimes. The synthesis suggests that the effectiveness of digitally mediated sustainability governance depends on institutional design, ethical oversight, and participatory data governance. By framing CEI as a synthesis-derived conceptual framework, this review contributes an analytical lens for examining how environmental intelligence is operationalized within corporate practice, while acknowledging the exploratory and evolving character of digitally mediated sustainability governance.