Resumen de How Serious Is Climate Change to Business?
David Kiron, Nina Kruschwitz, Knut Haanaes, Sonja-Katrin Fuisz-Kehrbach
Within the scientific community, climate change is increasingly seen as one of the most important long-term issues facing humanity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international scientific group recognized as an authority on climate change and its risks, wrote in a recent draft of a forthcoming report that human activity has almost certainly caused average global temperatures to increase during the second half of the twentieth century and that sea levels could rise by as much as three feet by the end of this century. In light of grave scientific concern with climate change and its likely effects on the planet and on economic activity how are managers thinking about this issue? Few studies have explored how managers are thinking about the connection between climate change and their businesses. In the fifth annual global executive survey about sustainability and innovation conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group in June 2013, more than 1,800 managers from a wide variety of industries and countries offered their views on how their companies are addressing climate change and other sustainability issues. Some of the results indicate that climate change has yet to become a very urgent issue for most companies and that just a small minority of companies are preparing for climate change-related impacts. Those companies where climate change is an urgent issue are more likely to have made changes to their business model in response to and to be measuring their effectiveness on sustainability issues. In an upcoming report (due out in the fourth quarter of 2013), the authors will discuss these results in greater detail, along with additional survey findings about how sustainability is playing out in the business context.
