Firms’ Adaptation Strategies to Climate Change: A Literature Review

Abstract

Climate change will impose high costs on different societal actors, including firms and organizations, forcing them to adapt to this new situation. Although the relevance of implementing adaptation strategies is widely recognized, studies on firms’ adaptation to climate change are still in their infancy. This study aims to identify the most suitable management theories for climate adaptation research, with a special interest in ski tourism that is one of the most vulnerable ones to climate change’s impacts. Here we conduct a literature review. First, there is a review of the management and organizational theories used in climate research. Second, we inform about the studies that have used the theories that were found in the first part. Results show that the majority of literature is focused on mitigation strategies and related to the corporate dimension. The most frequently studied industries are the ones under high institutional pressures like oil and gas, energy, and transportation. And the theories representing the different adaptation responses that organizations could adopt as a result of the direct climate change pressures are the resource-based view and resource dependence theory. But only the last one was used in previous research to analyze firms’ adaptation to climate change.