New publication: Corporate Climate Adaptation: Translating Complex Societal Risks into Business as Usual

[Maria-Therese Gustafsson]

Dear all,

We hope you are doing well.

We wanted to share a short new book that we recently published as a Cambridge Element: Corporate Climate Adaptation: Translating Complex Societal Risks into Business as Usual (In the series ’Organizational Response to Climate Change: Businesses, Governments’).

 

It focuses upon how the largest 37 mining companies have addressed climate risks, such as extreme weather events and water scarcity, and to what extent they consider the consequences for local communities when adapting to such risks. Despite that many mining-dependent countries are increasingly affected by climate impacts, we believe this topic has not received enough attention in academic and policy debates on the mining sector.

 

Drawing on novel quantitative and qualitative evidence, and extensive fieldwork in mining sites in Peru, we show that corporate adaptation is often selective, reactive, and layered into existing CSR initiatives, instead of addressing climate risks in a transparent and inclusionary manner. We argue that this outcome is best explained by a combination of weak regulatory controls, soft voluntary standards, and a lack of focus on climate risks by many advocacy groups. In our discussion, we reflect upon how these conditions can be strengthened to reduce the risks for maladaptive consequences in mining localities.

 

We hope our findings will be of interests to this community of researchers and professionals working on sustainability issues in the mining industry. If anyone is working on or interested in this topic, we would be happy to exchange with you.

 

The PDF is attached, and it’s also available open access here.

Best wishes,

Maria-Therese

 

 

Maria-Therese Gustafsson, PhD

Ass. Professor of Political Science | Director of Doctoral Studies

Stockholm University | Department of Political Science

106 91 Stockholm | Sweden