Economic Assessment of Pollution Impact on Formation of Sustainable Financing Strategies for Enterprises

The transition to sustainable development requires enterprises to account for the financial consequences of environmental pollution, yet reliable tools for quantifying these consequences remain limited. The purpose of the article is to develop a methodological approach to the economic assessment of the impact of environmental pollution on enterprises’ financial indicators and to substantiate sustainable financing strategies on this basis. The approach combines an integral indicator of the impact of pollution on the financial condition of an enterprise, a net present value model adjusted for environmental costs and an environmental risk premium, and regression models of return on assets (ROA) and weighted average cost of capital (WACC) that include environmental variables, together with an environmental risk index and an environmental load coefficient with explicit calculation rules. The article is methodological: the models are specified for application to panel data of enterprises, a procedure for their estimation and diagnostics is proposed, and their use is demonstrated on hypothetical illustrative examples rather than on empirical estimates. The illustrative calculation shows that ignoring environmental costs and risks can turn a project with a positive net present value into a value-destroying one. On this basis, a conceptual approach to forming sustainable financing strategies is proposed, comprising diagnostic, strategic, investment, financial-managerial and communication components, together with a typology of four strategies: environmental transformation, gradual ecologization, environmental improvement and environmental leadership, with criteria for selecting among them based on the terciles of their distribution. Sector-specific recommendations on financing instruments are formulated. The findings provide a methodological basis for integrating environmental parameters into enterprises’ financial strategies and investment appraisal.