Special issue on organizational resilience and climate change

Overview:

The importance of developing adaptation capacities to the adverse impacts of climate change has been firmly established in the Paris Agreement as an integral component of a climate-resilient future (United Nations, 2015). The accelerating pace of global change means that there is a case to significantly strengthen society’s capacity for climate change adaptation in parallel to global efforts aimed at accelerating climate change mitigation. The latest IPCC (2021) report provides a further clear warning that with additional warming, the world must prepare for more extreme weather events in the future. Many impacts of climate change are already visible – for instance, financial losses due to increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events due to climate change are continuously rising. As estimated by Munich Re, a reinsurance firm from Germany, damage due to climate extremes in 2020 stood at US$ 210bn, nearly 27% higher than the estimated losses in 2019 (Munich Re, 2021).

 

This special issue focuses on organizations, which we define broadly as “collectivities of actors whose activities are coordinated within definable social units to achieve certain common goals” (Berkhout, 2012: 91). Organizations include institutions, associations, and public sector entities. Organizations also include private-sector businesses as important actors in the global economy which will play a crucial role in building a climate-resilient future (Linnenluecke et al., 2012; Mendelsohn, 2006). The term organizational resilience generally describes the inherent characteristics of those organizations that are “able to respond more quickly, recover faster or develop more unusual ways of doing business under duress than others” (e.g., Linnenluecke, 2017::4). While there is a sizeable body of work examining aspects related to climate mitigation i.e. to reduce emissions or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases (e.g., Glienke & Guenther, 2016; Kolk & Pinkse, 2005; Paul, Lang & Baumgartner, 2017), research on resilience to the impacts of climate change has remained overall spare. Prior contributions have attempted to establish conceptual foundations for researching organizational adaptation to the impacts of climate change (Linnenluecke, 2010; Linnenluecke et al., 2012). Empirical contributions have assessed adaptation and resilience in specific sectors regions contexts, including tourism (e.g., Dogru et al., 2019; Luthe & Wyss, 2016); agriculture, fisheries, and forestry (e.g., Tisch & Galbreath, 2018; van Putten et al., 2013; Tashman & Rivera, 2016; Rivera & Clement, 2019), and critical infrastructure management (e.g., Kumar, 2021; Schulz, 2017). 

 

Objective:

Given that the impacts of climate change on organizations are expected to be significant, resilient organizations are seen as essential for societal well-being and providing livelihoods to billions of people around the world (ILO, 2020). This special issue seeks to draw together timely contributions that tackle the urgent question of how organizational resilience to climate change can be improved.  Specifically, this special issue aims to put forward the actions and solutions that can increase adaptive and absorptive capacities in organizations to the adverse effects and risks of climate change and explore the synergistic roles that sustainable finance and investment, policy instruments, and digitalization can play towards increasing organizational resilience against climate change.

We welcome diverse and interdisciplinary contributions, including original research, literature review, conceptual as well as empirical papers employing both qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches. For this special issue, we understand organization in a broad sense, spanning across private and public spheres, e.g., corporations, governmental and non-governmental organizations, small and medium scale enterprises, industrial organizations, and inter- and transnational organizations, among others.

 

We are currently inviting papers, including but not limited to the following topics:

 

1. How does climate impact organizations, and what are the resulting risks?
2. What are the costs of building resilience, and how do they relate to benefits?
3. What methods can be used to assess the resilience of organizations and organizational strategies?
4. How can organizations achieve multiple outcomes to tackle the impacts of climate change, for example, sustainability and resilience? How can resilience be combined with the uptake of clean energy, technology, and market opportunities?
5. What is the role of economic and policy instruments (risk financing, insurance, and public-private partnerships) in fostering organizational resilience?
6. How are green financing and investment linked to creating resilient organizations?
7. What are the challenges for organizations to build resilience in developing versus developed nations?
8. What are synergies and tradeoffs between climate-smart solutions, climate-resilient development, and a low carbon economy?
9. How can principles of the circular economy be applied in developing resilient organizational models?
10. How can digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics be employed to make organizations more agile and effective against future disruptions due to climate change?

 

Submission Instructions:

Submissions should be made via the ScholarOne submission system: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijccsm.

Please select the special issue title from the drop down menu.

 

Guest Editors:

Arijit Paul, University of Graz

Rawshan Ara Begum, National University of Malaysia

Rui Xue, Macquarie University

Rupert J. Baumgartner, University of Graz

Martina Linnenluecke, Macquarie University

 

About the International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management (IJCCSM): IJCCSM is an open access journal which provides a platform for papers assessing approaches to combat and cope with climate change. The 2020 Journal Impact Factor of IJCCSM is 2.645. Please note IJCCSM is an open access journal and an article processing charge (APC) applies. See https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/publish-with-us/author-policies/our-open-research-policies#apc for details.

 

 

References:

Berkhout, F. (2012). Adaptation to climate change by organizations. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews: climate change, 3(1), 91-106.

Dogru, T., Marchio, E. A., Bulut, U., & Suess, C. (2019). Climate change: Vulnerability and resilience of tourism and the entire economy. Tourism Management, 72, 292-305.

ILO (2021). World employment and social outlook: Trends 2021. Retrieved from https://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/weso/trends2021/WCMS…

IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.

Glienke, N., & Guenther, E. (2016). Corporate climate change mitigation: a systematic review of the existing empirical evidence. Management Research Review, 39(1), 2-34.

Kolk, A., & Pinkse, J. (2005). Business responses to climate change: identifying emergent strategies. California Management Review, 47(3), 6-20.

Kumar, N., Poonia, V., Gupta, B. B., & Goyal, M. K. (2021). A novel framework for risk assessment and resilience of critical infrastructure towards climate change. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 165, 120532.

Linnenluecke, M. K. (2017). Resilience in business and management research: A review of influential publications and a research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(1), 4-30.

Linnenluecke, M. K., Griffiths, A., & Winn, M. (2012). Extreme weather events and the critical importance of anticipatory adaptation and organizational resilience in responding to impacts. Business strategy and the Environment, 21(1), 17-32.

Linnenluecke, M., & Griffiths, A. (2010). Beyond adaptation: resilience for business in light of climate change and weather extremes. Business & Society, 49(3), 477-511.

Luthe, T., & Wyss, R. (2016). Resilience to climate change in a cross-scale tourism governance context: a combined quantitative-qualitative network analysis. Ecology and Society, 21(1).

Mendelsohn, R. (2006). The role of markets and governments in helping society adapt to a changing climate. Climatic change, 78(1), 203-215.

Munich RE. (2021). Record hurricane season and major wildfires – The natural disaster figures for 2020. Retrieved from https://www.munichre.com/en/company/media-relations/media-information-and-corporate-news/media-information/2021/2020-natural-disasters-balance.html

Paul, A., Lang, J. W., & Baumgartner, R. J. (2017). A multilevel approach for assessing business strategies on climate change. Journal of cleaner production, 160, 50-70.

Rivera, J., & Clement, V. (2019). Business adaptation to climate change: American ski resorts and warmer temperatures. Business Strategy and the Environment, 28(7), 1285-1301.

Schulz, A., Zia, A., & Koliba, C. (2017). Adapting bridge infrastructure to climate change: institutionalizing resilience in intergovernmental transportation planning processes in the Northeastern USA. Mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change, 22(1), 175-198.

Tashman, P., & Rivera, J. (2016). Ecological uncertainty, adaptation, and mitigation in the US ski resort industry: Managing resource dependence and institutional pressures. Strategic Management Journal, 37(7), 1507-1525.

Tisch, D., & Galbreath, J. (2018). Building organizational resilience through sensemaking: The case of climate change and extreme weather events. Business Strategy and the Environment, 27(8), 1197-1208.

United Nations. (2015). Paris Agreement. Retrieved from http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/convention/application/pdf… ent.pdf.

van Putten, I. E., Jennings, S., Frusher, S., Gardner, C., Haward, M., Hobday, A. J., ... & Revill, H. (2013). Building blocks of economic resilience to climate change: a south east Australian fisheries example. Regional Environmental Change, 13(6), 1313-1323.