Proactive Climate Research Articles

The Push for Proactive Climate Adaptation in Europe

Europeans are taking the risks presented by climate change seriously, and responding. Sixth in a series on climate adaptation around the world.

Coping With Collapse: A Stock-Flow Consistent Monetary Macrodynamics of Global Warming

This paper presents a macroeconomic model that combines the economic impact of climate change with the pivotal role of private debt. Using a Stock-Flow Consistent approach based on the Lotka–Volterra logic, we couple its nonlinear monetary dynamics of underemployment and income distribution with abatement costs. A calibration of our model at the scale of the world economy enables us to simulate various planetary scenarios. Our findings are threefold: 1) the +2 °C target is already out of reach, absent negative emissions; 2) the long-term (resp. short-term) results of climate change on economic fundamentals may lead to severe economic consequences without the implementation (resp. in case of too rapid an application) of proactive climate policies. Global warming (resp. too fast transition) forces the private sector to leverage in order to compensate for output and capital losses (resp. to lower carbon emissions), thus endangering financial stability; 3) Implementing an adequate carbon price trajectory, as well as increasing the wage share, fostering employment, and reducing private debt make it easier to avoid unintended degrowth and to reach a +2.5 °C target.

What role can African cities play in low-carbon development? A multilevel governance perspective of Ghana, Uganda and South Africa

Cities’ ability to mainstream climate goals into their activities is, to a large extent, influenced by the vertical divisions of responsibilities across different levels of government. This study examined how cities’ agency to steer low-carbon urban development is enabled or constrained by multi-level governance arrangements in Jinja in Uganda, Ga East in Ghana, and Polokwane in South Africa. In both Uganda and Ghana, uneven progress with implementing decentralisation reforms greatly limited local government action, and there was poor alignment of sectors they could influence and those with significant emissions reduction potential. In Polokwane, however, a highly devolved governance structure afforded the municipality authority and autonomy over a much wider range of functions. Across all three cases, however, systemic capacity and resource constraints constrained the potential to develop proactive climate governance.

Climate Change Sceptical Frames: The Case of Seven Australian Sceptics

Climate change sceptics are known for their resistance to proactive climate response policies, especially policies aimed at restricting greenhouse gas emissions. It is often assumed that scepticism about the science behind climate change would lead directly to outright rejection of all proactive climate policies aimed at mitigating emissions and adapting to climate-induced changes already under way. This article demonstrates the variability among the climate policy views of seven well-known Australian climate change sceptics in the period 2007-2012. Using the lens of frame-analysis, we unpack some key sceptic rationales and narratives. The analysis shows that sceptics share a master frame that privileges individualist-libertarian-progress-social order values, which are thus likely to conflict with the values implicit in conventional climate policy remedies. The analysis also shows that sceptical pre-occupations diverge at more detailed framing levels, with various practical concerns and fears often at the centre of sceptical argumentation.

The impact of climate change on developed economies

We use sub-national data to examine the relationship between temperature and growth within the United States and the European Union. Different from previous studies based on national data, we find that the optimal temperature is much lower. Because most of production takes place in areas with temperatures above the optimal temperature, projected temperature increases have significantly negative impact on the economic growth of the United States and the European Union. Our results suggest more proactive climate policy.

The latest in packaging news: from CO2 to plastic

We use sub-national data to examine the relationship between temperature and growth within the United States and the European Union. Different from previous studies based on national data, we find that the optimal temperature is much lower. Because most of production takes place in areas with temperatures above the optimal temperature, projected temperature increases have significantly negative impact on the economic growth of the United States and the European Union. Our results suggest more proactive climate policy.

Interactive effects of multiple organizational climates on employee innovative behavior in entrepreneurial firms: A cross-level investigation

Given that organizations need to manage complex situations, multiple organizational climates can coexist and these climates can jointly influence employee behaviors. However, the mechanisms through which the latter relationships operate are poorly understood. We take a multilevel approach to examine the mechanisms that link organizational innovative climate and employee innovative behavior, and the moderating effects of organizational proactive and risk-taking climates on these relationships. Using multisource data from 105 managers and 39 CEOs, we found that innovative climate was positively related to employee innovative behavior indirectly through employee passion for inventing. In addition, the relationship between innovative climate and passion for inventing became stronger as proactive climate increased, and the relationship between passion for inventing and employee innovative behavior became stronger as risk-taking climate increased. Our study contributes to entrepreneurial research by highlighting the interactive effects of multiple organizational climates on employee innovative behavior.

How the World's Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations. Edited by RobinGlobus Veldman, AndrewSzasz, and RandolphHaluza‐DeLay. New York: Routledge, 2014.

How the World's Religions Are Responding to Climate Change: Social Scientific Investigations. Edited by RobinGlobus Veldman, AndrewSzasz, and RandolphHaluza‐DeLay. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Transnational Climate Governance and the Global 500: Examining Private Actor Participation by Firm-Level Factors and Dynamics

In recent decades, businesses have participated in transnational climate governance (TCG) to share information, promote market mechanisms, and to set carbon emission reduction targets. This paper focuses on the Global 500, which are the world’s largest companies by revenue, to examine the factors and dynamics internal to companies that motivate some corporations, but not others, to engage in TCG. Empirical results based on multilevel mixed effects analyses, which separately identify the relative weight of firm and country-level factors, suggest that the likelihood that a firm participates in TCG is higher when it employs a large number of workers, has an explicit sustainability focus, and when there exists a “policy supporter” who champions sustainability policies and practices. Voluntary climate action and carbon disclosure are more likely to take place, along with a higher quality of carbon disclosure when the corporate actor invests in environmental R&D and/or certifies with the ISO 14001 environmental management standard. Moreover, the level of civil liberties that corporate actors enjoy in their respective country of origin is correlated with proactive climate action and carbon disclosure. This study has implications for climate change governance and policies, which have increasingly focused on concrete climate solutions and innovations by non-state and sub-state actors.

Climate Policy Constraints and NGO Entrepreneurship: The Story of Norway's Leadership in REDD+ Financing

Norway – a small northern country with only 5 million inhabitants – is at present a global leader in REDD&#43 financing. In this paper, we explain why and how this happened by telling the story about the emergence of Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) in 2007 and its institutionalization in the following years. We emphasize how a set of Norwegian climate policy characteristics prepared the ground for NICFI. These characteristics were the relative absence of less expensive potential emission cuts domestically, a tradition of seeking cheaper emission reduction options abroad, and few fiscal constraints due to high petroleum revenues. When the domestic demand for a more proactive climate policy started to increase from 2006 onward, two Norwegian environmental NGOs, The Rainforest Foundation Norway and Friends of the Earth Norway, exploited the window of opportunity that emerged from the tension between high domestic abatement costs and increasing domestic climate policy demands by proposing a large-scale Norwegian rainforest effort. This proposal resonated well with the new emphasis on reduced deforestation as a promising climate policy measure internationally. Towards the end of 2007, these ENGOs managed to convince a broad majority in Parliament that large-scale financing of measures to reduce deforestation globally should become an important part of Norwegian climate policy. Financing NICFI through the growth in the steadily increasing development aid budget dampened opposition from more fiscally conservative actors and facilitated the rapid set-up of a flexible implementing organization directly linked to some of the most proactive politicians. Several agreements with key rainforest countries were rapidly established, and including ENGOs in policy formulation and implementation helped maintaining the momentum and legitimacy for NICFI as a more permanent solution to Norway’s climate policy dilemmas. NICFI’s robustness and high level of legitimacy are illustrated by the fact that the initiative has survived the recent 2013 change of government quite intact. However, we also suggest that the long-time survival of the initiative may be dependent on the future of the UNFCCC process as well as the destiny of the national projects.

Corporate social responsibility and emerging powers

The growing weight of emerging powers in the world economy and their growing importance as host and also as home of transnational corporations and their affiliates has led to demands that these powers and companies take over more responsibilities in mitigating climate change and global environmental destruction as well as safeguarding or even improving social inclusion and well-being. Governments and companies in emerging economies were formerly reluctant to adopt these concepts but have more recently enacted and implemented proactive climate, environmental and more inclusive social and employment policies. Companies in emerging economies now rank nearly on par with those of advanced countries in including measures and policies for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in their business plans, but still lag in terms of concreteness of actions and in monitoring output. Causes for this policy shift are identified as well as differences in CSR performance between firms of emerging powers.

Determinants of GHG Reporting: An Analysis of Global Oil and Gas Companies

Corporate reporting on climate change is of increasing academic interest but is often considered solely from the firm perspective. This article extends current knowledge by considering how institutional pressures influence the greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting practices of multinational oil and gas companies. The results show that regulation under the EU emissions trading scheme and reporting according to the global reporting initiative (GRI) guidelines leads to better quality and more extensive reporting. Although generally adopting proactive climate change strategies, European companies do not have superior GHG reporting practices. Corporate media visibility does not impact GHG reporting practices which may be a reflection of the obscure portrayal of climate change in the print media or the fact that coverage is generally positive. This article adds to the current literature on GHG reporting practices demonstrating that institutional theory along with stakeholder theory and legitimacy theory can give further insights into explaining the GHG reporting practices of multinational companies.

Avoiding a Global Carbon Crisis: Learning from the Financial Crisis

AbstractThe global financial crisis originated in the subprime mortgage market in the United States in 2008 and its effects spread to all of the world's major financial markets. Only governmental programs and subsidies have prevented an outright crash of the world economy. What can the financial crisis teach us about the impending carbon crisis? What is needed to move the global economy toward sustainability, using renewable energy regimes, and low carbon consumption and production? This paper provides a nontechnological response to these questions by highlighting six key sociocultural lessons and suggesting two key recommendations in how to overcome the current carbon lock‐in. Firms should establish proactive climate strategies. Policymakers can facilitate this by developing farsighted governance mechanisms and setting the right incentives and boundary conditions. We conclude that a mix of both is required to prevent the global carbon crisis from becoming a reality. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The International Dimension of Climate Change Policy

Climate change is a major challenge to international cooperation, as emphasized for instance by the Stern Review and various IPCC reports (Stern 2006; IPCC 2007) but also many others. One of the main problems of achieving cooperation under international climate agreements is free-riding. Countries have an incentive to adopt a non-cooperative behaviour. Emission reduction constitutes a public good. No country can be excluded to benefit from the emission reduction of other countries. Moreover, by not contributing to emission reduction, a country saves on abatement cost. The Kyoto Protocol ran out in 2012, but all efforts to negotiate an effective follow-up protocol have failed up to now. The reason is not that no negotiations would have taken place, but simply that no proposal was yet formally adopted which sets emission ceilings such that greenhouse gas emissions are stopped from further growing. What is required are substantial cut backs on emissions in order to meet the widely accept target of not allowing the average global temperature to increase beyond 2 ∘C. The seven papers in this special issue look at various important aspects related to the international dimension of climate policy. The first five papers are theoretical papers, the last two papers employ a climate simulation model combined with a game theoretic module to derive their results. Issues that are covered are for, instance, the problem of long-term commitment of governments to a proactive climate policy, the role of R&D in clean technologies, in terms of how they are induced through various policy instruments but also how spillovers and adoption of green technology can support international cooperation, the role of ancillary benefits for the success of climate agreements, the relationship between trade and climate policy, the design of supply-side climate policies to address the green paradox, the driving forces that support or undermine a unilateral climate policy without full participation and finally the role of fat tail distributions of uncertain damages on the performance of partially cooperative climate agreements. In the following, we summarize these papers briefly and encourage the reader to have a careful read of this excellent selection of papers, which span a wide range of important topics in the current debate about an effective way forward in addressing the climate change problem.

Multinationals' Climate Change Capabilities: Threat or Opportunity as the Driving Force?

Multinationals are increasingly developing proactive climate change strategies in response to increases in regulatory, social and competitive pressures. Whether or not these strategies lead to improvements in environmental and financial performance depends on the extent to which firms are able to develop new capabilities and reconfigure existing ones. In this paper, I examine the development and reconfiguration of multinationals’ climate change capabilities. I explore if and how interpretations of the threats and opportunities associated with climate change affect capability development and reconfiguration. Using qualitative survey data on a sample of Global 500 firms from the Carbon Disclosure Project over the period 2003 to 2009, I construct measures of capability evolution and transformation. I examine the extent of capability development and explore the effects of framing on this development over time. This paper contributes to the dynamic capabilities literature by examining how threat and opportunity frames act as mechanisms in the development and reconfiguration of capabilities. It contributes to the empirical environmental strategy literature by adding a longitudinal dimension to environmental capabilities research. The results have implications for managers and policymakers in deciding how best to balance the positive and negative aspects associated with long-term environmental challenges such as climate change.

World Heritage hot spots: a global model identifies the 16 natural heritage properties on the World Heritage List most at risk from climate change

UNESCO’s 207 natural heritage World Heritage Properties are at risk from climate change, but risk varies widely among properties. I offer a global model based on multi-model general circulation model (GCM) ensembles, vulnerability and Human Influence (HII), producing the World Heritage Vulnerability Index (WHVI), a measure of relative risk among properties. Nineteen properties are most at risk (i.e. WHVI > mean + 1 SD). Those include islands (i.e. Vallée de Mai, Aldabra, East Rennell, Teide, Laurisilva of Maderia, Isole Eloie, Pitons Management Area, Morne Trois Pitons and Galapagos Islands), coastal properties (i.e. Everglades, Desembarco del Granma, High Coast and Kvarken Archipelago, Doñana, Brazilian Atlantic Islands, Ichkeul and the Sunderbans) and mountainous properties (i.e. the Pyrenees Mont Pérdu, Nanda Devi and the Valley of Flowers, and Mount Kinabalu). Three properties (i.e. Teide, Isole Eloie and the Pitons Management Area) are geologic, apparently relatively resistant to short-term climactic changes. The remaining 16 are likely to respond to climactic changes in the next 40 years; those changes may threaten their World Heritage status. Those properties are where society could most effectively invest in adaptation. I identify adaptive strategies and next steps for proactive climate change adaptation in the 16 natural heritage properties on the World Heritage List most at risk.

Institutional capacity-building for targeting sea-level rise in the climate adaptation of Swedish coastal zone management. Lessons from Coastby

For coastal areas across the world, sea-level rise and problems of coastal erosion and coastal flooding are expected to increase over the next hundred years. At the same time political pressure for continued waterfront planning and development of coastal areas threatens to increase our societal vulnerability, and necessitating climate adaptation in coastal zone management. The institutional dimension has been identified as important for ensuring a more robust adaptation to both current climate variability and future climate change. In this paper, lessons regarding institutional constraints for climate adaptation are drawn from a Swedish case-study on local coastal zone management, illustrating the diverse and complex nature of institutional capacity-building. The aim of the paper is to illustrate critical factors that from an institutional perspective condition the capacity to achieve a more integrated, strategic and proactive climate adaptation and for turning “rules on paper” to working practice, based on case-study experiences from Coastby. Following and expanding a framework for analysing institutional capacity-building we learnt that a selective few key actors had played a critical role in building a strong external networking capacity with a flip-side in terms of a weak internal coordinating capacity and lack of mutual ownership of coastal erosion between sectoral units e.g. risk-management, planning and environment. We also found a weak vertical administrative interplay and lack of formal coherent policy, procedures and regulations for managing coastal erosion between local, regional and national administrations. Further, tensions and trade-offs between policy-agendas, values and political priorities posed a barrier for capacity-building in coastal zone management which calls for processes to mediate conflicting priorities in policy-making, planning and decision-making. The case-study suggests that the ability of the political administrative system to acknowledge and deal with institutional conflicts is a critical condition for ensuring an integrated and proactive climate adaptation in coastal zone management.

Future European agricultural landscapes—What can we learn from existing quantitative land use scenario studies?

Abstract The structure of agricultural production and spatial patterns of agricultural land use in Europe are expected to face major changes over the next decades due to changes in global trade, technology, demography and policies. This paper presents a set of 25 scenarios comprising information on quantitative land use changes in Europe. The scenarios have been selected from studies with different foci, operating on both different spatial scales and different time horizons. Given the diversity of quantitative scenarios this review illustrates the scenario design and its quantification, and evaluates the results of land use/cover changes on a European level. Major gaps of current scenario exercises and suggestions for improvement are topics of the discussion section (Section 4 ). The focus of this review is on the comparison of selected driving forces and on agricultural land use/cover change in “Western Europe” (i.e. EU-15 plus Switzerland and Norway for some studies). Results show large differences in future land use/cover changes ranging from moderate decreases (15%) to large increases (30%) depending on the assumptions about global trade, increase in agricultural productivity and biofuel production. Domestic demand is a minor factor of land use/cover change since population is only changing slightly, and the consumption level is stable and decoupled from economic growth. Scenarios show that the rate and direction of land cover change differ over time. Considerable shifts towards grassland abandonment in many scenarios reflect the changes in agricultural management. Increasing biofuel production as a result of both increasing energy demand and pro-active climate policies takes up considerable areas in many scenarios and prevents substantial abandonment of agricultural land. Although comparable quantitative results concerning European agricultural land use/cover change are only available on a very aggregated level, the results are important to be dealt with when discussing future challenges of rural areas.

Proactive climate in a post-reorganization setting: When staff compensate managers' weakness

This study explored the effects of proactive climate on performance in a post-reorganization setting. We hypothesized that proactive climate should have both a direct effect on unit performance and should—in the sense of the “substitutes for leadership” approach—enhance the effect of managers' entrepreneurial attributes (e.g., personal initiative) on unit performance. Hypotheses were tested using data from organizational units, called “centres” (n = 35), of four recently reorganized public transport organizations. Managers provided ratings of centre performance, and centre members assessed their centre's climate. Proactive climate was positively related with performance. Moderated regression analyses revealed significant interaction effects between proactive climate and some centre manager variables; however, the interaction pattern indicated that proactive climate compensated for a low degree of entrepreneurial attributes.

Climate Change Strategies and Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation of The Natural Resource-Based View of The Firm

There is widespread consensus that human activity has had a significant im­pact on global climatic patterns which will have important consequences for much of society. Although there has been much research on the relationship between cor­porate environmental performance and corporate financial performance, empirical testing of the association between proactive corporate climate-change strategies and financial (or accounting) performance is still in its infancy. Based on the logic em­bodied in the Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV) of the firm, firms that success­ fully implement strategies to lessen their effect on climate change should outperform competitors who are less proactive in such efforts. This study uses a matched-pair design to empirically demonstrate that firms with proactive climate change strate­gies achieved significantly higher levels of accounting performance than competi­tors that were less proactive, thus providing additional support for the NRBV.