Silent Strategies: CEO Populism, Supply Chain Opacity, and Biodiversity Disclosure

This study examines whether CEO populist rhetoric is associated with corporate biodiversity disclosure and whether supply‐chain opacity conditions this relationship. Using an unbalanced panel of 1828 nonfinancial listed firms from 12 European countries over 2014–2022, the analysis comprises 15,842 firm‐year observations in the baseline estimation. Firm fixed effects, two‐stage least squares, and two‐step system GMM models are used to account for unobserved heterogeneity, potential endogeneity, and dynamic persistence. The findings show that CEO populist rhetoric is negatively associated with biodiversity disclosure and positively associated with supply‐chain opacity, indicating that stronger populist rhetoric coincides with less visible, specific, and verifiable publicly reported upstream supply‐chain information. The moderation analysis provides qualified evidence that lagged supply‐chain opacity strengthens the negative association between CEO populism and biodiversity disclosure, suggesting that executive rhetoric is more strongly related to lower nature‐related transparency when upstream information is less visible and verifiable. These findings extend the understanding of biodiversity disclosure beyond a predominantly technical reporting perspective by showing that nature‐related transparency is associated with both executive rhetorical framing and the informational conditions surrounding upstream supply chains. Integrating upper echelons theory with stakeholder and institutional perspectives, the study explains how CEO rhetoric may shape the interpretation of external accountability demands while supply‐chain opacity affects the informational conditions under which such interpretations are reflected in disclosure. The study contributes to research on executive communication, sustainability governance, biodiversity reporting, and the credibility of corporate environmental disclosure.