Taking climate change seriously: Time to credibly communicate on corporate climate performance

Mickaele Le Ravalec, Alexandre Rambaud and Véronique Blum

Ecological Economics, 2022, vol. 200, issue C

Abstract: To address climate change, regulators have required companies to provide more information about their environmental impact such as their greenhouse gas emissions. However, reporting choices lacking comprehensiveness, corporate report users cannot assess how much companies contribute to limiting global warming. This research presents a new problematization of the multiple facets of this phenomenon and the subsequent communication requirements, drawn on the Luhmann's system theory. We position the issue successively in the scientific, political, and economic systems. Our analysis suggests that the economic system is unable to properly capture the messages from its environment and that it favors the outside-in perspective over the inside-out one, meaning that it focuses on the impact of its environment on itself and not the opposite. Therefore, any definition of corporate climate performance by the economic system will be limited because this system, like any other, is forced to understand its environment from its own perspective. We suggest that a new system, fully dedicated to sustainability, would be more appropriate to handle this concept and propose to consider corporate climate performance as an indicator reflecting how far a firm is from a targeted trajectory for keeping global warming below a threshold.

Keywords: System theory; Luhmann; Global warming; Climate performance; Climate accounting; Offsetting; Carbon neutrality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092200204X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:200:y:2022:i:c:s092180092200204x

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107542

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().