Companies face growing societal expectations to contribute to climate change mitigation. They also face growing stakeholder pressures to manage their business climate risks. More and more companies are assembling climate change response portfolios based on reducing their footprints, labeling their products, disclosing risk, and going for net-zero, among other components.
But the effectiveness of these portfolios in mitigating either societal or business climate risk cannot be assumed. Many portfolios will be characterized by initiatives better characterized as "greenwishing" and "greenwashing" than actual risk management. Rather than reducing a company's climate risks, including these initiatives in business portfolios could do just the opposite.
Your Climate Change MBA provides evidence-based assessments of a wide range of components of business climate portfolios. In most cases we will point you to the relevant assessment literature, contrasting points of view, pre-set search terms, as well as other potential materials and resources.
Among the business responses you can explore in this section of Your Climate Change MBA are:
- Adapting to Climate Change
- Carbon Footprint Reductions
- Carbon Offset Purchases
- Climate Risk Disclosure
- Climate Stress Testing
- Green Energy Purchasing
- Internal Carbon Pricing
- Materiality Assessment
- Net Zero Commitments
- Policy Advocacy
- Policy Opposition
- Scenario Planning
- Science-Based Targets
- Gamification of Climate Risk
- Product Labeling
- Employee and Consumer Education
Business advisers have been writing books and reports for years as to why companies should anticipate and respond to climate change based on the prevailing business and society paradigm of "profit maximization and shareholder returns = societal benefit." But the paradigm of profit maximization as a measure of societal welfare is increasingly being challenged. It is hard to know how it will turn out, or what the measurable alternatives to profit maximization might turn out to be, but any significant shift in the perceived role of business in advancing societal welfare would have implications for business and climate change conversations.
That’s why several high-level questions are also explored in this section of Your Climate Change MBA:
Are business and societal interests and roles merging?
Is it in companies’ self-interest to rethink which "Business America" they fit into?
Will “Business America 6” (climate leadership and policy advocacy) become corporate best practice?
These last two questions builds on the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications (YPCCC), which has tracked the evolution of climate change public opinion for more than a decade. They use a "Six Americas" framework that spans a continuum from “alarmed” to “dismissive.” But neither the YPCCC nor anyone else has sought to categorize the climate change thinking of business decision-makers. Without understanding those views, it's much more difficult to target the right "actionable climate knowledge" to the right business decision-maker.
In Your Climate Change MBA, you can explore all of these topics in considerable depth, and be hyperlinked to the Climate Web itself for additional curated knowledge collections.