The Economist, "Which MBA", June 25, 2012
BUSINESS academics should play an important role in the debate about climate change. They are well positioned to join forces with atmospheric scientists, engineers and materials specialists at their universities to produce multi-disciplinary suggestions as to what the world should do. Can geoengineering efforts be tried on a small enough level that a firm should take a go at it? Is it worth tinkering with supply chains to bring in increasingly cheaper solar panels? How should marketing professionals appeal to both those customers who demand some form of environmental gesture from firms and those convinced global warming is a smug liberal practical joke? And so on.
They should play an important role, but they actually play a marginal one. A special issue on climate change from the journal Business and Society says that out of 31,000 articles published in 30 highly-ranked business journals between 1970 and 2006, a mere nine mentioned climate change or global warming. Since then the subject has popped up a bit more frequently; the Academy of Management even devoted its entire 2009 conference to the idea of “green management”. But the guest editors of the Business and Society collection cautiously note that large gaps in the literature still exist. Climate change being the enormous collective-action problem that it is, it is not enough to write about a business response, or a regulatory response, alone. Responses (or the lack thereof) to climate change happen because of the complicated interactions between businesses and government.
One of the interesting contributions to the Business and Society issue, by Bettina Furrer of Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Jens Hamprecht and Volker Hoffmann of ETH Zurich, surveys the climate-change policies of 114 banks around the world, half of them European. They found a range of approaches: from the “hesitators” (nearly half the sample), who do very little save purchase a few emissions certificates, to the “forerunners” (only six of the 114), who go as far as including climate-change risk analyses in their investment proposals. Most of the banks addressed climate change by limiting employee travel or energy use in their buildings, but kept it separate from the essential businesses of banking....
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