Impact of digital transformation on sustainability-driven safety climate and PPE compliance: Evidence from oil and gas infrastructure projects

In energy infrastructure construction projects, particularly in the Oil and Gas (O&G) sector, poor compliance with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) remains a persistent safety challenge. Although safety climate is recognized as a major driver of PPE adherence, conventional approaches often overlook sustainability principles and digital innovation. Digital Transformation (DT) presents new opportunities to embed proactive and scalable safety practices, yet limited empirical evidence exists on how DT enablers and barriers influence sustainability-driven safety climate in high-risk O&G settings. This study addresses this gap by investigating how DT can improve the sustainability-driven safety climate to support and improve PPE compliance in energy infrastructure construction. A multi-phase mixed-methods approach was adopted, including semi-structured interviews to identify DT enablers and barriers, questionnaire surveys to evaluate their influence on Sustainable Safety Climate (SSC) practices, a hierarchical fuzzy analysis to quantify DT impacts, fuzzy VIKOR to prioritise barriers, and an expert panel to validate results and propose targeted recommendations. The analysis showed that DT enablers significantly improve SSC dimensions, with cybersecurity assurance, innovation-oriented culture, and stakeholder pressure being the most influential. The most critical barriers were data privacy concerns, limited time for digital upskilling, and low awareness of DT's safety benefits. Leadership commitment to sustainable safety emerged as the most improved SSC dimension under DT influence, followed by preventive and resilient risk management strategies and balanced safety-productivity integration. The study offers practical and theoretical contributions. For industry, it provides a strategic pathway for integrating DT with sustainability-driven safety practices to support improved PPE compliance in O&G construction. For academia, it introduces a methodological framework combining fuzzy inference modelling and multi-criteria decision-making to assess complex safety factors under uncertainty, supporting future comparative and longitudinal research.