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Climate change is one of the key challenges of this century due to its impact on society and the economy. Students are asking their business schools to scale up climate change education (CCE) across all disciplines, and employers are looking for graduates ready to work on solutions. This desire for solutions is shared by faculty; however, in a recent survey, many highlighted that they lack knowledge about climate change mitigation and how to integrate CCE into their disciplines.
This chapter supports lecturers, professors and senior management in their journey to get an overview of CCE and, more importantly, to find high-impact climate solutions to be integrated and assessed in their teaching units.
Why are organizations and markets slow to transform toward sustainability despite the abundant well-recognized opportunities it provides? An important subset of the phenomena this question addresses involves decision-makers recognizing the existence of opportunities but failing to undertake ambitious, effective, sufficient, or timely action. Building on existing research on capability traps, market formation, and managing sustainability, we focus on the forces con-straining organizations from developing the capabilities and market infrastructures required for sustainability transformations. We characterize types of sustainability initiatives and, using causal loop diagramming, visualize structures that enable and constrain how organizations can navigate individually and collectively worse-before-better dynamics resulting from uncertain,nonlinear, and delayed returns. Being under day-to-day pressures and deeply intertwined within their environment, organizational actors find it difficult to recognize, undertake, maintain, and coordinate necessary efforts internally and externally. We discuss research implications and directions for future research on avoiding these traps and accelerating sustainability transformations.
The EAT–Lancet planetary health diet (PHD) provides guidelines on a global scale and calls for red meat consumption to be halved. Operational PHD guidelines at country level have yet to be determined. Here we argue that the biological link between milk and bovine-meat production must be considered when operationalizing the globally calculated PHD to national contexts. Using a stylized computer simulation model rooted in a food system approach, we explore the impact of dietary scenarios on milk and bovine-meat production and show that ignoring this biological link can lead to substantial imbalances between national dietary guidelines and production outcomes and potentially lead to food waste. Furthermore, we assess current national dietary guidelines in Europe and find that most disregard this biological link and are incompatible with the PHD, with implications for policymakers and consumers to consider when adapting the PHD in national contexts.
Many scientific reports have warned about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change, with the latest international report calling for emissions of climate pollutants to reach net zero by around 2050 (IPCC, 2018). Limiting warming to 1.5°C could save more than 100 million people from water shortages, as many as 2 billion people from dangerous heatwaves, and the majority of species from climate change extinction risks (IPCC, 2018; Warren et al., 2018). The actions taken to achieve these climate outcomes would generate benefits of more than $20 trillion while easing global economic inequality (Burke et al., 2018). Scientists make it clear that it is physically possible to meet these goals using today’s technologies (Holz et al., 2018). Yet emissions of climate pollutants continue to grow, reaching a new record high in 2018 (Jackson et al., 2018). Clearly, scientific evidence has failed to spark needed climate action. The question now is: what can?
Coopetitive endeavors offer valuable strategic options for firms. Yet, many of them are failure-prone as partners must balance collective and private interest. While interpartner trust is considered central for alliance success, paradoxically, the role and dynamics of trust is still not understood. We synthesize a computational model, capturing relational dynamics of an alliance, encompassing coevolution of trust, partner contributions, and (relative) alliance interactions. Analyzing alliance dynamics using simulation we find and explore a tipping boundary, separating a regime of alliance failure and success. We identify implications for collaborative (aspirations) and private strategies (openness). Our analyses reveal that strategies informed by a static mental model of partner trust, contributions, and openness tend to yield subpar alliance results and hidden failure-risk. We discuss implications for management theory.
Kopainsky et al., (2020) examines intended and unintended transition effects of the Swiss food system on the system's structure and the environment. Kopainsky et al.'s research refers to studies on and is embedded in research streams in global health (Jamison et al., 2013) and sustainable food systems (Willett et al., 2019). It also addresses many of Steffen et al.'s (2015) planetary boundaries, the United Nations' (2015) sustainability goals (SDGs), and potentially could address how they are interrelated, following Randers et al. (2019). It is furthermore embedded in research on natural and human systems, particularly in the intertwined business, supply and demand, governance, ecological and health feedback loops (Swinburn et al., 2019). This feedback view enhances understanding and assessment of drivers towards improving human and ecological health and mitigating climate change.
Traditional communication of research on climate change fails to encourage individual, corporate, and political leaders to take appropriate action. We argue that this problem is based on an overly simplistic unidirectional model of science communication. Conversely, theory shows that active learning processes are better suited to initiate and mobilize engagement among all stakeholders. Here, we integrate theoretical insights on active learning with empirical evidence from serious gaming: communication should be understood as an integral design feature that relates active learning on climate change to tangible action.
Background. We describe and provide an initial evaluation of the Climate Action Simulation, a simulation-based role playing game that enables participants to learn for themselves about the response of the climate-energy system to potential policies and actions. Participants gain an understanding of the scale and urgency of climate action, the impact of different policies and actions, and the dynamics and interactions of different policy choices.
Intervention. The Climate Action Simulation combines an interactive computer model, En-ROADS, with a role play in which participants make decisions about energy and climate policy. They learn about the dynamics of the climate and energy systems as they discover how En-ROADS responds to their own climate-energy decisions.
Methods. We evaluated learning outcomes from the Climate Action Simulation using pre- and post-simulation surveys as well as a focus group.
Results. Analysis of survey results showed that the Climate Action Simulation increases participants’ knowledge about the scale of emissions reductions and policies and actions needed to address climate change. Their personal and emotional engagement with climate change also grew. Focus group participants were overwhelmingly positive about the Climate Action Simulation, saying it left them feeling empowered to make a positive difference in addressing the climate challenge.
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) face tension between economic growth and environmental impact. Tourism fuels growth, but the resulting solid waste and other pollutants threaten the SIDS’ natural beauty, quality of life for residents, attractiveness to tourists, and economic success. We assess the tension between tourism-driven economic growth and environmental degradation from a limits-to-growth perspective, developing a generic system dynamics model of the problem using 38 years of data from the Maldives to estimate parameters and Monte-Carlo methods to assess the sensitivity of results to uncertainty. We contrast development paths for the next three decades under three sets of policies focusing on promoting growth, managing tourism demand–supply balance, and improving waste management. Findings are counterintuitive; policies focused on better waste management alone are self defeating, because they increase tourism, growth and waste generation, undermining attractiveness and growth later. Policies that limit tourism demand improve economic and environmental health.
Climate change communication efforts grounded in the information deficit model have largely failed to close the gap between scientific and public understanding of the risks posed by climate change. In response, simulations have been proposed to enable people to learn for themselves about this complex and politically charged topic. Here we assess the impact of a widely-used simulation, World Climate, which combines a socially and emotionally engaging role-play with interactive exploration of climate change science through the CROADS climate simulation model. Participants take on the roles of delegates to the UN climate negotiations and are challenged to create an agreement that meets international climate goals. Their decisions are entered into C-ROADS, which provides immediate feedback about expected global climate impacts, enabling them to learn about climate change while experiencing the social dynamics of negotiations. We assess the impact of World Climate by analyzing pre- and post-survey results from >2,000 participants in 39 sessions in eight nations. We find statistically significant gains in three areas: (i) knowledge of climate change causes, dynamics and impacts; (ii) affective engagement including greater feelings of urgency and hope; and (iii) a desire to learn and do more about climate change. Contrary to the deficit model, gains in urgency were associated with gains in participants' desire to learn more and intent to act, while gains in climate knowledge were not. Gains were just as strong among American participants who oppose government regulation of free
markets - a political ideology that has been linked to climate change denial in the US - suggesting the simulation's potential to reach across political divides. The results indicate that World Climate offers a climate change communication tool that enables people to learn and feel for themselves, which together have the potential to motivate action informed by science.