Climate Competitiveness
An Annotated Bibliography

I.   Prior use of the term “climate competitiveness”

 

Jonathan Lash & Fred Wellington (2007)
“Competitive Advantage on a Warming Planet”
“In this article, the authors offer a systematic approach to mapping and responding to climate change risks. … [They] propose a four-step process for responding to climate change risk: Quantify your company’s carbon footprint, identify the risks and opportunities you face, adapt your business in response, and do it better than your competitors. Today’s customers insist that the companies they support do their part to address climate change.”
https://hbr.org/2007/03/competitive-advantage-on-a-warming-planet

Accountability (2010)
"The Climate Competitiveness Index 2010: National progress in the low carbon economy -- Summary for Decision-Makers" (report prepared for UNEP)
“A green economy brings with it not only the opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also to generate new jobs, new technologies and new businesses. This report underlines the move towards a green economy in different regions and helps to assess which regions are currently best placed to thrive in the low carbon economy of the future. … Developing the Climate Competitiveness Index and the accompanying analysis has also made us even more aware of shortcomings in the underlying data and the need to push for more robustness and comprehensiveness for the Index to become even more meaningful and applicable in the coming years.” https://unfccc.int/files/adaptation/application/pdf/accountability_climate_competitiveness_index_2010_21042010.pdf

 

OECD (2010)
“Climate change and competitiveness”
(Remarks by Angel Gurria, OECD Secretary General, at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies)
“[T] here are many challenges to build a comprehensive international framework to address climate change. But if domestically we are able to make progress in dealing with competitiveness concerns, this will take us a good way forward.  We, at the OECD, with several decades of experience in dealing with climate change and a recent mandate to develop a Green Growth Strategy, are ready to continue contributing to inform the debate.”
https://www.oecd.org/env/cc/climatechangeandcompetitiveness.htm

 

World Bank (2016)
“A greener path to competitiveness : policies for climate action in industries and products” 
“Although industry’s threat to climate and the environment is clear, the business case for decarbonizing manufacturing – making it greener – is not. A new report from The World Bank Group, CLASP, and Carbon Trust, A Greener Path to Competitiveness offers recommendations and guidance on how companies and countries can stay competitive while implementing more climate-friendly technologies and strategies.”
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/competitiveness/publication/a-greener-path-to-competitiveness-policies-for-climate-action-in-industries-and-products

OECD (2018)
Issue Paper: “Green policies and firms’ competitiveness”
“A major concern in the context of the green transition is the potential impacts of environmental policies, and of green growth policy packages more generally, on the competitiveness of companies affected by these regulations. Businesses and policy makers fear that, in a world characterised by integrated global value chains and capital flows, differences in the stringency of environmental policies across countries could shift pollution-intensive production capacity towards regions with less ambitious regulation. … Many countries are concerned that their efforts to achieve carbon emission reductions will put their own carbon- intensive producers at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy, and such concerns are often used by policy makers as a justification for not introducing more ambitious environmental policies.” 
https://www.oecd.org/greengrowth/GGSD_2018_Competitiveness%20Issue%20Paper_WEB.pdf

 

Trucost (2018)
“Corporate Climate Competitiveness: Growing Your Business, Optimizing Investments, and Managing Costs”
“Because transitioning to a low-carbon economy presents companies with complex choices, Trucost developed the Green Transition Tool to simplify decision-making. The tool quantifies different ways to decrease fossil use, reduce exposure to carbon-related costs, and communicate alignment with the Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations. This paper examines three investment scenarios using the Green Transition Tool, consolidating publicly disclosed data — and compares the financial and environmental investment returns of each scenario.”
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/research/corporate-climate-competitiveness-growing-your-business-optimizing-investments-and-managing-costs

 

World Economic Forum (WEF) (2019)
“The Global Competitiveness Report”
“[T]he World Economic Forum introduced last year the new Global Competitiveness Index 4.0, a much-needed new economic compass, building on 40 years of experience of benchmarking the drivers of long-term competitiveness. The index is an annual yardstick for policy-makers to look beyond short-term and reactionary measures and to instead assess their progress against the full set of factors that determine productivity. … The results of the GCI 4.0 in 2019 reveal that, on average, most economies continue to be far from the competitiveness “frontier”—the aggregate ideal across all factors of competitiveness. …[I]t is crucial for economies to rely on fiscal policy, structural reforms and public incentives to allocate more resources towards the full range of factors of productivity to fully leverage the new opportunities provided by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_TheGlobalCompetitivenessReport2019.pdf

Hauke Ward, Jan Cristophe Steckel & Michael Jakob (2019)
“How global climate policy could affect competitiveness”
Energy Economics 84(1): 104549
“A global uniform carbon price would be economically efficient and at the same time avoid ‘carbon-leakage’. Still, it will affect the competitiveness of specific industries, economic activity and employment across countries. This paper assesses short-term economic shocks following the introduction of a global carbon price that would be in line with the Paris Agreement. …We find that impacts on industrial competitiveness are highly heterogeneous across regions and economic sectors.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988319303445

Agnieszka Karman, Andrzej Miszczuk & Urszula Bronisz (2021)
“Regional Climate Change Competitiveness -- Modelling Approach”
Energies 14(12):3704
“The article deals with the competitiveness of regions in the face of climate change. The aim was to present the concept of measuring the Regional Climate Change Competitiveness Index. We used a comparative and logical analysis of the concept of regional competitiveness and heuristic conceptual methods to construct the index and measurement scale. …The conclusions of the research confirm the possibility of applying the Regional Climate Change Competitiveness Index in the economic analysis and strategic planning. The presented model constitutes one of the earliest tools for the evaluation of climate change competitiveness at a regional level.”
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/12/3704

Roland Berger (2021)
“Climate action: A new competitiveness paradigm”
Yvonne Ruf & David Frans
“Action on climate change is no longer an optional or second-rate consideration for companies; it must be prioritized as a core strategic pillar. Decarbonization is essential as a sign of a business’ willingness to curb climate catastrophe. …The study … addresses the urgent need for climate action and provides strategic recommendations on how companies can get an edge over the competition.”
https://www.rolandberger.com/en/Insights/Publications/Climate-action-A-new-competitiveness-paradigm.html

 

Bundezfinanzministerium (BMF, the German Federal Finance Ministry) (2021)
“Steps towards an alliance for climate, competitiveness and industry – building blocks of a cooperative and open climate club”
“Practically all industrialised countries and emerging economies are facing the same overarching challenges: achieving the decarbonisation of the economy requires a massive technological effort. This can be tackled most efficiently together by means of international cooperation. While many countries are ramping up their efforts at the national (or European) level, we still lack a protective international framework… that would keep climate policy pioneers from being at a disadvantage in the international marketplace. … It is clear that economies can only remain viable in the long term if there is an ambitious reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, high climate standards should not place countries at a competitive disadvantage in the short or medium term, causing important industries to shift abroad.” 
https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/EN/Downloads/Climate-Action/key-issues-paper-international-climate-club.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4

 

Toon Vandyck, Matthias Weitzel, et al. (2021)
“Climate policy design, competitiveness and income distribution: A macro-micro assessment for 11 EU countries”
Energy Economics 103:105538
“Concerns about industry competitiveness and distributional impacts can deter ambitious climate policies. Typically, these issues are studied separately, without giving much attention to the interaction between the two. Here, we explore how carbon leakage reduction measures affect distributional outcomes across households within 11 European countries. … While these findings suggest a competitiveness-equity trade-off, the results also show that … there is room for policy to reconcile competitiveness and equity concerns.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988321004151

Climate Strategies Poland Foundation, CDP & Germanwatch (2022)
“Corporate Climate Competitiveness Guide”
“This report has been prepared in the form of a comprehensive guide on climate competitiveness, addressed to the owners, supervisory and management board members, as well as the managers of medium and large companies. The study also aims to provide comprehensive knowledge to audiences who have not encountered any issues related to the carbon footprint, climate strategies, or issues related to the energy transition so far.”
https://climateandstrategy.com/the-corporate-climate-competitiveness-guide/

 

Business Roundtable (2021)
“A Call to Action from the Global Business Community: Global Businesses Support Climate Action that Enhances Competitiveness”
“Companies across the world have made climate action central to their strategies. Many of the companies we represent are setting climate targets and working towards net zero emissions. To get there, they are boosting energy efficiency, scaling up the generation and use of renewable energy, and integrating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction, resilience and adaptation strategies into the hearts of their business plans. The urgency and scale of the climate challenge is difficult to overstate. Yet the transformation of the global economy that it demands also presents an enormous and unprecedented opportunity for companies and citizens to achieve more sustainable prosperity.” 
https://www.businessroundtable.org/a-call-to-action-from-the-global-business-community-global-businesses-support-climate-action-that-enhances-competitiveness

 

Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (2021)
“Clean and Competitive: Opportunities for U.S. Manufacturing Leadership in the Global-Low Carbon Economy” 
“The United States needs an integrated national strategy to address the twin challenges of bolstering its manufacturing sector and averting climate change. Timely federal RD&D and deployment policies targeted to specific manufacturing industries could create comparative advantage, expanding domestic investment and employment.”
https://itif.org/publications/2021/06/21/clean-and-competitive-opportunities-us-manufacturing-leadership-global-low/

 

Economics Observatory (2022)
“How are climate change policies affecting firms’ competitiveness?” 
“Policies to tackle climate change can impose costs on firms, especially those with high emissions of greenhouse gases, potentially reducing their competitiveness in global markets. Such measures can also encourage innovation and provide opportunities for growth.”
https://www.economicsobservatory.com/how-are-climate-change-policies-affecting-firms-competitiveness

 

Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES)(2021)
“The Business Case for Climate Action”
“Leading companies recognize climate change as both a risk and an opportunity.  A growing number are taking steps to strengthen their resilience to climate impacts, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, produce innovative low-carbon technologies, and support policies enabling a smooth transition to a low-carbon economy.”
https://www.c2es.org/content/the-business-case-for-climate-action/

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II.   Key background materials

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The Paris Climate Agreement (2015)
“The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its overarching goal is to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
Full text available at: https://unfccc.int/process/conferences/pastconferences/paris-climate-change-conference-november-2015/paris-agreement

 

IPCC (2023)
AR6 “Summary for Policymakers” report 
“The Synthesis Report is based on the content of the three Working Groups Assessment Reports: WGI – The Physical Science Basis, WGII – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, WGIII – Mitigation of Climate Change, and the three Special Reports: Global Warming of 1.5°C, Climate Change and Land, The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.  [It] consists of an introduction and three main sections arranged by timeframes. The first section, ‘Current Status and Trends’, covers the historical and present period. The second section, ‘Long-term Climate and Development Futures’, addresses projected futures up to 2100 and beyond. The final section is ‘Near-term Responses in a Changing Climate’, considers current international policy timeframes, and the time interval between now and 2030-2040."
https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf

US National Climate Assessment (2019)
“The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), completed in November 2018, is a comprehensive and authoritative report on climate change and its impacts in the United States. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was established by Presidential initiative in 1989 and mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990. Its mandate is to develop and coordinate ‘a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.’  USGCRP comprises 14 Federal agencies that conduct or use research on global change and its impacts on society.” 
https://www.globalchange.gov/nca4

     
UNEP (2022)
Emissions Gap report 2022: “The Closing Window”
“As growing climate change impacts are experienced across the globe, the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall is unambiguous. Yet the Emissions Gap Report (EGR) 2022: The Closing Window – Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies finds that the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.”
https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022

 

United Nations (2012)
“The Future We Want”  -- Declaration of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio 
“The Future We Want is the declaration on sustainable development and a green economy adopted at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio on June 19, 2012. The Declaration includes broad sustainability objectives within themes of Poverty Eradication, Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture, Energy, Sustainable Transport, Sustainable Cities, Health and Population and Promoting Full and Productive Employment. It calls for the negotiation and adoption of internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals by end 2014. It also calls for a UN resolution strengthening and consolidating UNEP both financially and institutionally so that it can better disseminate environmental information and provide capacity building for countries.” The full text of the Rio+20 outcome document is available at:
https://www.eea.europa.eu/policy-documents/the-future-we-want-2013declaration

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United Nations (2015)
“Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”
“Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 SDGs was adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York in September 2015. … Every year, the UN Secretary General presents an annual SDG Progress report, which is developed in cooperation with the UN System, and based on the global indicator framework and data produced by national statistical systems and information collected at the regional level. … Additionally, the Global Sustainable Development Report is produced once every four years to inform the quadrennial SDG review deliberations at the General Assembly. It is written by an Independent Group of Scientists appointed by the Secretary-General.”
https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

James Hanson 1988 testimony to US Senate
“Statement of Dr. James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute”
James Hansen is known as the "Father of Global Warming" chiefly because of his 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate, in which he announced that "... the greenhouse effect has been detected, and is changing our climate now." A transcribed excerpt of his remarks “Greenhouse Effect and Global Climate Change” at the June 23, 1988 hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate is available at: 
https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/june_23_1988_senate_hearing_1.pdf

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III.   Recent popular books related to climate change

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Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Macmillan (2015)
“New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before.  [T]here have been Five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. … This time around, the cataclysm is us.”
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062185/thesixthextinction

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Naomi Klein
This Changes Everything
Simon & Schuster (2015)
“In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways.” 
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/This-Changes-Everything/Naomi-Klein/9781451697391

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David Wallace-Wells
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Random House (2019)
“The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabitable-earth-by-david-wallace-wells/

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John Doerr
Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now
Random House (2021)
“With clear-eyed realism and an engineer’s precision, Doerr lays out the practical actions, global ambitions, and economic investments we need to avert climate catastrophe. Guided by real-world solutions, Speed & Scale features unprecedented, firsthand accounts from climate leaders … and dozens of other intrepid policymakers, innovators, and scientists.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688191/speed-and-scale-by-john-doerr/

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
Knopf (2021)
“Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. … In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/633968/how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster-by-bill-gates/

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Kim Stanley Robinson
The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
Hachette Book Group (2020)
“The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. … [T]his extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.”
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kim-stanley-robinson/the-ministry-for-the-future/9780316300131/

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III.   Selected climate topics relevant to business and finance

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Business generally

Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson & Tom Steyer
“Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States”
Risky Business Project (2014)
“A Climate Risk Assessment for the United States identifies the economic risks posed by a changing climate. The U.S. will likely face the effects of human-induced climate change including rising seas and more frequent bouts of extreme heat. The report identifies striking economic impacts from climate change, from the near-term to the end of the century across all 50 U.S. states.”
http://riskybusiness.org/report/national/

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Mark Trexler & Laura Kosloff
The Changing Profile of Corporate Climate Change Risk
Routledge (2012)
“As national and global policy to materially reduce climate change is delayed, it is business-prudent to assume that the level of climate risk is increasing. … Should physical impacts of climate change manifest in dramatic ways, …[t]hese conditions create a complex and shifting business risk environment, and most companies either overlook or substantially underestimate key climate risks.”
https://www.routledge.com/The-Changing-Profile-of-Corporate-Climate-Change-Risk/Trexler-Kosloff/p/book/9781909293007

 

Christopher Wright & Daniel Nyberg
Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction
Cambridge University Press (2015)
“This book explores the complex relationship that the corporate world has with climate change and examines the central role of corporations in shaping political and social responses to the climate crisis. … This book moves beyond descriptive and normative approaches to provide a sociologically and critically informed theory of corporate responses to climate change.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/climate-change-capitalism-and-corporations/9FD46E7FF5F9FE71508831A23D43DEE0

 

Jorge Rivera
Business Adaptation to Climate Change
Cambridge University Press (2022)
“This book seeks to advance the understanding of how businesses may adapt to climate change trends. Specifically, it focuses on two general research questions: Firstly, how do businesses adapt to chronic slow-onset nature adversity conditions linked to climate change? Secondly, how do firms adapt to weather-related natural disasters exacerbated by climate change?”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/business-adaptation-to-climate-change/28B8E17A77161222A6CA797D7708956F

 

Terry Anderson
Adapt and Be Adept: Market Responses to Climate Change
Hoover Institution Press (2021)
“How can markets help us address the challenges of climate change? Most current climate policies require hard-to-enforce collective action and focus on reducing greenhouse gases rather than adapting to their negative effects. [In this book] Terry L. Anderson brings together essays by nine leading policy analysts who argue that adaptive actions can typically deliver much more, faster, and more cheaply than any realistic climate policy.”
https://hooverpress.bookstore.ipgbook.com/adapt-and-be-adept-products-9780817924553.php

McKenzie Funk 
The Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
Penguin Books (2015) 
“Funk shows us that the best way to understand the catastrophe of global warming is to see it through the eyes of those who see it most clearly—as a market opportunity. Global warming’s physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk … profile[s] entrepreneurial people who see in each of these forces a potential windfall.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/303480/windfall-by-mckenzie-funk/

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Insurance and climate adaptation

 

M. Beck, O. Quast & K. Pfliegner
“Ecosystem-based Adaptation and Insurance: Success, Challenges and Opportunities”
“[F]ew fully integrated Climate Risk Finance & Insurance (CRFI) & EbA products … currently exist. ...That said, there are many common interests and significant opportunities which could help improve integration of CFRI with EbA and more broadly Nature-based Solutions (NbS), which will lead to innovations beneficial to both sectors and, most importantly, to improved resilience outcomes for vulnerable people and for nature.” https://www.adaptationcommunity.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/EbA_insurance_publication_2019_web.pdf

 

Governance & policy

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Michael P. Vandenbergh  & Jonathan Gilligan
Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change
Cambridge University Press (2017)
“Private sector action provides one of the most promising opportunities to reduce the risks of climate change, buying time while governments move slowly or even oppose climate mitigation. Starting with the insight that much of the resistance to climate mitigation is grounded in concern about the role of government, this books draws on law, policy, social science, and climate science to demonstrate how private initiatives are already bypassing government inaction in the US and around the globe.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/beyond-politics/5B7D5AB62C63D54EC35CBB95D72A47D9

 

Climate change and Innovation

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Stelvia Matos, Eric Viardot, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Frank W. Geels & Yu Xiong 
“Innovation and climate change: A review and introduction to the special issue”
Technovation, 117:102612 (2022)
“While innovation is expected to play a major role in decarbonization, the development and diffusion of low-carbon technologies are too slow in most sectors and countries to stabilize the climate. In this introductory paper … we review selected innovation studies literature, reflect on historical trends and insights, and cast light on future research on innovation and climate change.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497222001596

 

Climate communications

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M. Ballew, M. Verner, J. Carman, S. Rosenthal, E. Maibach, J. Kotcher & A. Leiserowitz
“Global Warming’s Six Americas across age, race/ethnicity, and gender”
Yale University and George Mason University: Program on Climate Change Communication (2023)
“The Global Warming’s Six Americas framework is an audience segmentation approach to understanding the spectrum of people’s responses to global warming. … In this analysis, we assess demographic group differences in climate opinion – and how they interact – by investigating Global Warming’s Six Americas across age, race/ethnicity, and gender. We combine data from the six latest waves of our Climate Change in the American Mind surveys spanning from 2020-2022.”
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/global-warmings-six-americas-age-race-ethnicity-gender/

 

Climate change science

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The Economist (2010)
Briefing: “The clouds of unknowing”
“The defenders of the consensus tend to stress the general consilience of their efforts—the way that data, theory and modelling back each other up. Doubters see this as a thoroughgoing version of “confirmation bias”, the tendency people have to select the evidence that agrees with their original outlook. But although there is undoubtedly some degree of that … there is still genuine power to the way different arguments and datasets in climate science tend to reinforce each other.”
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2010/03/18/the-clouds-of-unknowing

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The Economist (2022)
Briefing: “The world is going to miss the totemic 1.5C target”
“In the years since Paris, the 1.5°C target went from something to be pursued to something totemised. A stretch goal has been widely treated as a paramount one. … [S]eeing the target treated as attainable has led many to believe that added political will and increasingly fervent denunciations of fossil fuels can get the range of the possible all the way down to a warming of just 1.5°C. … This year, as the climate world meets in Sharm el-Sheikh … for COP 27, it would be far better to acknowledge that 1.5 is dead.”
https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2022/11/05/the-world-is-going-to-miss-the-totemic-1-5c-climate-target

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Kerry Emanuel 
What We Know About Climate Change, Updated Edition
MIT Press (2018)
“In this updated edition of his authoritative book, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel outlines the basic science of global warming and how the current consensus has emerged. Although it is impossible to predict exactly when the most dramatic effects of global warming will be felt, he argues, we can be confident that we face real dangers. …Emanuel calls for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gases and criticizes the media for downplaying the dangers of global warming.”
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535915/what-we-know-about-climate-change/

 
 

Climate change scenarios

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Nardia Haigh
Scenario Planning for Climate Change: A Guide for Strategists
Routledge (2019)
“Uncertainty about access to resources, unanticipated weather events, rapidly changing market conditions and potential social unrest is felt across all business and industry sectors. This book sets out an engaging step-by-step scenario-planning method that executives, Board members, managers and consultants can follow to develop a long-term strategy for climate change tailored for their business.”
https://www.routledge.com/Scenario-Planning-for-Climate-Change-A-Guide-for-Strategists/Haigh/p/book/9781138498402

 

 

Geoengineering, carbon capture

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Oliver Morton
The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World 
Princeton University Press (2015)
“[A] small but increasingly influential group of scientists is exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the climate system: a stratospheric veil against the sun, the cultivation of photosynthetic plankton, fleets of unmanned ships seeding the clouds. These are the technologies of geoengineering—and as Oliver Morton argues in this visionary book, it would be as irresponsible to ignore them as it would be foolish to see them as a simple solution to the problem.”
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691148250/the-planet-remade

 

Wil Burns, David Dana & Simon Nicholson (eds.) 
Climate Geoengineering: Science, Law and Governance
Springer (2021)
“This volume … explore[s] scientific, political and legal issues associated with the emerging field of climate geoengineering. …The sobering reality of the disconnect between the resolve of the world community to effectively address climate change, and what actually needs to be done, has led to increasing impetus for consideration of a suite of approaches collectively known as “climate geoengineering,” [and] has transformed climate geoengineering from a fringe concept to a potentially mainstream policy option within the past decade.”
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-72372-9

 

Climate as a threat multiplier

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Sherri Goodman & Pauline Baudu
Briefer: “Climate Change as a ‘Threat Multiplier’: History, Uses and Future of the Concept”
The Center for Climate & Security (2023)
“’Threat multiplier’ has become a widely used term by scholars and practitioners to describe climate change implications for security in both the policy realm and climate-security literature. …It captures how climate change effects interact with and have the potential to exacerbate pre-existing threats and other drivers of instability to contribute to security risks. … Its use has also been described as ‘one of the most prominent ways in which the security implications of climate change have been understood.’ ”
https://climateandsecurity.org/2023/01/briefer-climate-change-as-a-threat-multiplier-history-uses-and-future-of-the-concept/

 

Threat of civilizational collapse

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Jem Bendell & Rupert Read (eds)
Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos
Polity (2021)
“‘Deep adaptation’ refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for – and live with – a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies. … This is the first book to show how professionals across different sectors are beginning to incorporate the acceptance of likely or unfolding societal breakdown into their work and lives. They do not assume that our current economic, social and political systems can be made resilient in the face of climate change.”
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Deep+Adaptation:+Navigating+the+Realities+of+Climate+Chaos-p-9781509546831

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Daniel Steel, C. Tyler DesRoches & Kian Mintz-Woo
“Climate change and the threat to civilization”
PNAS (2022)
“Here we call for treating the mechanisms and uncertainties associated with climate collapse as a critically important topic for scientific inquiry. Doing so requires clarifying what “civilization collapse” means and explaining how it connects to topics addressed in climate science, such as increased risks from both fast- and slow-onset extreme weather events. This kind of information, we claim, is crucial for the public and for policymakers alike, for whom climate collapse may be a serious concern.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2210525119