**1. Introduction**

Hardly a day passes without news of corporate wrongdoing and misbehavior. Unethical actions by corporations, including employees' safety faults, bribery of officials, scandals, and environmental damages, continue to happen.

Corporate misconduct is considered as a serious phenomenon, which presents a high level of danger in many fields such as the economy, health and safety in the workplace, environmental protection, human rights, and others. Despite the growing awareness of ethical responsibility and the clear penalties and regulations associated with corporate misbehavior, these actions continue to occur.

In recent years, companies are becoming more aware of social and environmental sustainability, and there has been a global movement toward more sustainable ways of working. However, corporate disasters still happen.

Environmental catastrophes are something that every company deals with, including oil spills, industrial explosions, fires, gas emissions, and pollution. These disasters could happen accidentally, or they could be something that happened due to human irresponsibility, which could be prevented if they were paying enough attention.

Nonetheless, following a disaster, companies will have to do their best to overcome the catastrophic situations they made. As these disasters can have serious consequences, companies will need to clean up their mess and rebuild trust with the public by being more responsible and considerate toward the environment.

Environmental disasters are not always predictable because accidents do happen, but it is very difficult to protect the company's image if the disaster could have been prevented. For example, if there is a major fire that was caused due to negligence, the firm could receive backlash from the public. A fire may not only affect the business, but it could also destroy other businesses and harm the environment through air pollution.

A concrete example of an environmental disaster is BP's 2010 major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which is considered as one of the worst companies that caused environmental disasters ever. Not only was this damaging to the ocean environment, but it also had a negative impact on the company's reputation. The company not only lost money from losing its product in the ocean, but it received a lot of backlash and loss of consumers. It is essential for companies to take immediate remedial action in case of an environmental disaster.

Along with the BP disaster, The Niger Delta incident should be mentioned too. During the period of 1970 to 2000, there were over 7.000 oil spills and over 13 million barrels of oil. Explosions were frequent, with the largest one until date, killing more than 1.000 innocent people in 1998. The major convict in the pitiable state of the Niger Delta is Exxon Mobile, which has till date escaped the trials. Local indigenous groups have sprung to action against numerous refineries and have resorted to bombing and firing in the region, to warn the companies to avoid the Niger Delta.

Over the last two decades, the whole globe is becoming more aware and concerned about environmental protection around the world because of the occurrence of some serious environmental accidents, generating negative impacts on health and ecosystems [1].

Undoubtedly, environmental accidents affect firms' value [1, 2], increase political costs, and bring reputation penalties [3], which could be reflected in the market response to these environmental events [1].

According to that, firms can manage potential environmental exposure by pursuing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives or by engaging in political lobbying with the aim of influencing environmental laws [4]. Scholars have broadened a lot of attention to CSR, which is considered as an important phenomenon [5, 6] mostly due to the increasing focus on the environmental aspects [7].

In the present age, environmental protection is considered to be as one of the most important and debated political issues. In recent decades, there have been an increasing number of scientific studies addressing the gravity of the situation of our planet, and the growing awareness toward environmental damages caused by pollution raised large political support for a more environmentally friendly economy and strict environmental regulations [8].

Recently, scholars have broadened great attention to corporate environmental responsibility [3, 9], but the evidence on the economic value of pursuing CSR is still far from conclusive [10–12].

Specifically, there has always been a debate about whether CSR increases firm value [13–15] or presents agency problems that drain shareholder resources and reduce productivity [16, 17].

In contrast to CSR, which includes changing firm behavior, corporate lobbying constitutes an alternative strategy aimed at changing policy proposals to benefit firms or industries in the case of environmental misconduct [18–20].

In this chapter, we will be discussing the relationship between CSR and corporate lobbying in the event of environmental misconduct and their effect on firm

performance. Our chapter is organized as follows: Section (2) presents the effect of CSR on firm performance. Then, we analyze the impact of corporate lobbying in Section (3).
