Citation
Jabbour, C.J.C., Lopes de Sousa Jabbour, A.B. and Leal-Filho, W. (2017), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, Vol. 9 No. 5, pp. 579-580. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCCSM-05-2017-0126
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited
Managing organizations for climate change action: moving the sustainable development goals forward
Sustainability has been considered a paramount ingredient of organizational excellence. After the Conference of Parties 21 (COP21), Paris, 2015, climate change has been recognized by many organizational leaders as one of the greatest dilemmas and problems faced by humanity, in need of future global climate change policies and actions, according the 13th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) “Climate Action”. At the organizational level, strategies will need to be managed considering climate change mitigation purposes to contribute to initiatives related to climate action and the SDGs. Neglecting climate action can put organizations in a dangerous trap, damaging their competitive objectives. On the other hand, climate action can generate a myriad of benefits for proactive organizations. The benefits include potential operational improvements, anticipating and influencing climate change regulations, accessing new sources of capital and funding, improving risk management and resilience, enhancing corporate reputation, identifying new green market opportunities and enhancing human resource management.
But at the moment, the picture of challenges and opportunities related to managing organizations for effective climate action is unclear. In this context, the goal of this special issue is to build a bridge between organizational management and climate action by presenting a number of outstanding articles in this field. The contributions are:
“Resilience for Sustainability as an Eco-Capability”, aiming at identifying which dynamic capabilities foster organizational resilience towards sustainability.
“Learning Lab on Disaster Risk Management for Sustainable Development (DRM-SD): An Evaluation”, focusing on a learning lab experience in Malaysia, Vietnam, Lao PDR and Cambodia led by the Centre for Global Sustainability Studies.
“Measuring the level of corporate commitment”, which examines the various climate change practices adopted by firms and develops a set of corporate climate change indexes that measure the level of climate change corporate commitment.
“Organizational Adaptation to Climate Change: Learning to Anticipate Energy Disruptions”, aiming at investigating how organizational learning affects the development of anticipatory adaptation to climate change in companies.
“Eco-efficiency measurement and improvement of Chinese industry using a new closest target method”, which provides a new way to measure the Chinese industries’ eco-efficiency.
“Dynamics of Environmental Consciousness and Green Purchase Behaviour: An Empirical Study”, which explores the relationship between environmental consciousness and green purchase behaviour in an emerging economy.
“Antecedents of Low Carbon Emissions Supply Chains”, a work which deals with the role of top management commitment in translating external pressures into responses that help to build low carbon emissions in supply chains.
These original articles pave the way to understand the role of organizations in achieving the SDGs related to climate action.