Two decades of corporate responses to climate change - A systematic literature reviewMiriam Arndt

26. Oktober 2020

The awareness of the climate crisis is increasing in society as well as in the corporate world. Many businesses put climate change and sustainable business development on the agenda. Yet, GHG emissions are steadily increasing. This big disconnect (Dyllick & Muff, 2016) is starting to get more attention from the management literature and needs further investigation. The master thesis at hand takes upon this phenomenon and presents a review of 60 articles from the past two decades on corporate responses to climate change to find the most reported corporate activities.

The findings show that there are 16 distinct activities, which companies choose and implement in response to climate change. These activities can be classified into four categories (communication, collaborations, managerial measures, operational measures). As Dyllick and Muff (2016) call for a distinction between effective and ineffective corporate measures, and Slawinski et al. (2017) claim that corporate activities need to lead to absolute emission reduction to be effective, the corporate activities of this analysis are examined on their GHG emission reduction potential. One can see that only the category of operational measures stands out.

Hence, the study shows that companies need to target absolute emission reduction by changing their products, processes, or energy source if they want to make an effective contribution to climate change mitigation. In the variety of corporate strategies to climate change, this result helps to identify whether companies are contributing to climate change mitigation. This study further highlights future research proposals and points out the need to take the ecological and social macro-level into perspective when talking about corporate strategies and climate change mitigation.