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This paper aims to explore whether board diversity in best citizen companies influences carbon emissions score. A sample of 85 Best Citizen companies over 5 years (2015–2020) was analyzed using panel regression models (static and dynamic). The empirical results suggest that the panel dynamic regression supports the impact of board diversity on the scope of CO 2 emissions score. The empirical results suggest that two dimensions of board diversity (cultural and skills diversity) have contributed positively and significantly to the outstanding environmental performance of best citizen companies and led to high scores of CO2 emissions. In this study, citizen companies have been analyzed for the first time with the same methodology in the setting of board diversity and carbon emissions. Cultural diversity and directors’ skills on corporate boards have been unexplored by previous studies examining the factors that influence CO2 emissions. This research will enhance the understanding of the main factors responsible for CO2 emissions score enhancement in best citizen companies. Introduction Best citizen companies ranked as the first 100 among 1000 American publicly traded companies. This prestigious ranking is given based on outstanding scores achieved on environmental, social, and governance dimensions. Best citizen companies are the top performers in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices, and this high performance is due to the deep commitment toward the different stakeholders (Qureishi et al., 2021). Citizen companies conduct their operations under high scrutiny of stakeholders and they are supposed to have greater sense of ethics and sensitivity. High score in the environmental dimension demonstrates the dedication of best citizen companies toward the achievement of United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the deployment of considerable efforts to answer the global calls of climate change (CC). Environmental and CC concerns are among the public's top interests (Burkhardt et al., 2020). Human activity is accountable for environmental corrosion, particularly carbon emissions, which are considered to be the global prevailing disasters (Shahbaz et al., 2013). The United Nations agenda (2030) raises the urgent intervention needed to tackle CC and its repercussions. (Carlsson Kanyama et al., 2021). Despite the presence of a global alarm that requires that all companies boost their efforts towards the achievement of SDGs, companies do not perform at the same level and, in particular, in lowering greenhouse emissions (GHE). Family businesses may be more dedicated to environmental protection since they need to defend their non-financial goals (Berrone et al., 2010). CC performance is embedded in the business strategy of corporations and it reflects the CSR involvement of corporations. (Ooi et al., 2019). The corporate governance (CG) system is crucial to accomplishing the firm's sustainability goals (Pizzi et al., 2021). A sound governance board, as an internal mechanism of CG, can lead firms to progress in environmental practices and facilitate the SDGs fulfillment. The board of directors (BD) has a plethora of strategic priorities, and it is challenging to allocate time and resources to address in a holistic way all risks and opportunities. CC received considerable interest as it can disrupt the activities of companies. BD have to respond in a short time horizon to the expectations of stakeholders. Although board diversity is the topic of long-standing theoretical debate, the impact of boardroom diversity on GHE is still unexplored by scholars and the empirical results are inconclusive. In this paper, we explore whether board diversity of best citizen companies influence their carbon emissions score. Therefore, the main research question of this paper that we try to answer is the following: which board diversity characteristics affect more the carbon emissions score? This study has many contributions with respect to the previous studies connecting CG variables to environmental performance. First, existing studies on the corporate board are linked to the ESG score as an overall score or sub-scores in terms of environmental, social and governance. Therefore, carbon emissions were not measured as a separate variable and the use of the overall environmental score does not allow for studying the direct and separate effect of important aspects of the environmental dimension. Second, the cultural diversity variable was explored only by few studies related to carbon emissions (Haque, 2017; Kılıç and Kuzey, 2019; Varrone et al. (2020); Valls Martínez et al. (2022)). Third, the role of gender diversity in shaping the carbon emissions score is also not been extensively examined by researchers. (Haque, 2017; Nuber and &Velte, 2021; García Martín and Herrero, 2020). Fourth, this paper explores the impact of BD expertise and background on environmental practices. Finally, to the best of the author's knowledge, this study is the first to examine the impact of board diversity on carbon emissions score in the case of citizen companies. The rest of this article is structured as follows. The next section presents the theoretical and hypothesis development of the study. Data and methodology are presented in section 3. Section 4 discusses the results. Section 5 concludes. Section snippets Theoretical framework and hypothesis development The BD plays a major role in formulating the strategic plan of companies. This role entails setting goals and objectives and identifying priorities. Therefore, the characteristics of the BD may influence the overall performance of the company and ensure the achievement of the triple bottom-line objectives. The topic of the impact of BD diversity on performance has attracted the attention of scholars and researchers, and many theories have been developed to explain the relationship between BD Data and sample Our sample includes the best 100 citizen companies in the Russel 1000 index. The companies are considered among the largest 1000 public companies in US. this classification results from the calculation of an unidimensional and composite score on the basis of many criteria. The ranking of best 100 companies has been initiated by Business Ethics Magazine in 1999. 3BL (Three bottom-line) MEDIA has continued the ranking process since 2018. The yearly list of best citizen companies along with their Descriptive statistics Table 3 shows the descriptive statistics of the variables of our study. On average, the ratio of CO2 emission is 3.738. It reaches a minimum of 0.215 and a maximum of 7.272. The board size ranges between 8 and 18 directors, and on average citizen companies are controlled by 12 directors. The best citizen companies have a high percentage of independent directors. On average, 86.8% of directors are independent. The average tenure of board directors is 7.85 years. The years of tenure are above 15 Conclusion and practical implications Board diversity is crucial in CC governance. Exploring the potential governance factors that can trigger or inhibit the carbon emissions score is recently tackled and is still an unexplored area. The aim of this paper was to explore whether board diversity has an impact on the carbon emissions score of American best citizen companies. Based on a sample of 85 US publicly traded companies for the period from 2015 to 2020, static and panel dynamic estimations have been conducted to test the CRediT authorship contribution statement Khaoula Aliani: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision. Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. References (47) M.D.C. Valls Martínez et al. Are gender and cultural diversities on board related to corporate CO2 emissions? J. Clean. Prod. (2022) M. Shahbaz et al. 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