Rory Sullivan - Climate Change and the Governance of Corporations: Lessons from the Retail Sector

Climate change represents the most important environmental challenge of our time. Organisations are responding by implementing governance processes and taking action to reduce their own emissions and the emissions from their supply chains and value chains. Yet very little is known about how these efforts contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (if, indeed, they make any substantive contribution at all) or about how they might be harnessed to deliver more ambitious reductions in emissions.

This book explains when and where particular forms of governance intervention including internal governance processes and external governance pressures are likely to impact climate change. From this analysis, it offers practical proposals on the climate policy frameworks that need to be in place to facilitate or accelerate changes in corporate behaviour.

The book is truly global: it focuses on the world's 25 largest retailers (including Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour, Sears and Aldi) and is based on detailed interviews with senior managers from these corporations, and with key global and national NGOs, corporate responsibility experts, politicians and regulators. These interviews provide clear insights into how external governance pressures and actions (public opinion, regulation, incentives) interact with internal governance conditions (management systems and processes, corporate policies, board/CEO leadership) to change and shape corporate actions on climate change and, in turn, the climate change impacts of these corporations.

This book can be used as a core reference for any courses dealing with corporate governance and business strategy, in particular those relating to climate change and to environmental management more generally. It is also of relevance to business practitioners, public policy makers, investors and NGOs interested in ensuring that companies play a constructive role in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Rory Sullivan is CEO of Chronos Sustainability, Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and General Editor of the Routledge Responsible Investment series. He is an internationally recognised expert on climate change, human rights and investment, with over 30 years experience in the public and private sectors on these issues.

Andy Gouldson is Professor of Environmental Policy at the University of Leeds and an adjunct professor in the Department for Architecture and Planning at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His previous roles include Director of the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, and most recently as Dean for Inter-Disciplinary Research at the University of Leeds.

Series Editor: Rory Sullivan

The ground-breaking Responsible Investment series provides a forum for outstanding empirical and theoretical work on all aspectsof responsible investment, allowing the tensions and practical realities of responsibleinvestment to be addressed in a readable, robust and conceptually and empiricallyrigorous format.

Subject areas covered include:

• The financial, environmental, social and governance outcomes from responsible investment.

• Responsible investment in different asset classes.

• Responsible investment in different geographies.

• The implementation of responsible investment by different actors (e.g. pension funds, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, private equity funds, insurance companies), and in different geographic regions.

• The role that has been played by collaborative initiatives such as the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, UNEPFI and the investor networks on climate change.

• Public policy and responsible investment.

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Principles and Practice of Impact Investing: A Catalytic Revolution

Edited by Veronica Vecchi, Luciano Balbo, Manuela Brusoni, Stefano Caselli

The Responsible Investor Handbook: Mobilizing Workers' Capital for a Sustainable World

By Thomas Croft, Annie Malhotra

The Long Hedge: Preserving Organisational Value through Climate Change Adaptation

By Jason West

Dilemmas in Responsible Investment

By Cline Louche, Steve Lydenberg

Valuing Corporate Responsibility: How Do Investors Really Use Corporate ResponsibilityInformation?

By Rory Sullivan

Responsible Investment

Edited by Rory Sullivan, Craig Mackenzie

Climate Change and the Governance of Corporations: Lessons from the Retail Sector

By Rory Sullivan and Andy Gouldson

Dr Rory Sullivan is CEO of Chronos Sustainability a specialist advisory firm which delivers transformative, systemic change in the social and environmental performance of key industry sectors and Visiting Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is an internationally recognised expert on climate finance and responsible investment. He has worked extensively with a range of organisations including UNEP FI, the World Economic Forum, UNDP, the Principles for Responsible Investment, the Transition Pathway Initiative, the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, the World Bank and the OECD as well as with national governments and many private sector and civil society organisations on issues such as corporate sustainability, climate change and responsible investment. He is the author/editor of eight books, over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles, over 50 book chapters and many reports and articles on climate change and investment issues.

Andy Gouldson is Professor of Environmental Policy at the University of Leeds. He is an inter-disciplinary environmental social scientist whose work combines aspects of geography and environment, politics and policy, economics and management and science and technology studies. His main area of expertise relates to the influence of different forms of policy and governance on businesses, on economic development and on the relationships between environment, economy and society. He has also worked extensively on the management of environmental risks and on theories of ecological modernisation and environmental justice. Much of his work has focused on issues relating to air pollution, and more recently he has focused on the management of the risks associated with climate change and on enhancing the prospects for a transition towards a low-carbon economy. He was one of the founding directors of the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and of the ESRC Place-based Climate Action Network. He has been Editor of the journal Environmental Policy and Governance (formerly European Environment) since 1991.

First published 2021

by Routledge

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2021 Rory Sullivan and Andy Gouldson

The right of Rory Sullivan and Andy Gouldson to be identified as authors of this workhas been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.