Fall 2021 | 4. Sem. | BA Digital Business & Management | Prof. Dr. Hasan Koç

Students: Fabio Kunckel, Samuel Dennis Mietke, Timur Soroka 

Global warming is one area of research that has been steadily increasing in discussions along the last decades. With temperatures increasing around the globe and natural disasters happening in higher frequency, businesses are starting to pay more and more attention to it since it will impact the future of the whole global population, especially in littoral areas and places prone to natural disasters. Since 2010, the overall number of articles published about this topic has increased as it is important to understand and have literature about this phenomenon in order to take action against, to prevent, and prepare for what is coming in the near future. The objective for this systematic literature review is to generate awareness of what kind of research is being published in the field of climate change and business, within the time frame of 2010 to 2021. Our research may support future studies in pinpointing missing aspects in the literature and to understand what measures are necessary for businesses to survive and improve the global situation.

More business literature on the topic of global warming has been published in more recent years. The topic of climate change and global warming has been increasing in the interest all over the world.

When analyzing the n-gram results, some topics become more prominent compared to the keyword frequency results. The bi- and trigrams seem to have a stronger focus on environmental issues. Bigrams such as extreme weather, weather events, GHG emissions, and Trigrams such as extreme weather events, and global warming issues might show that the environmental aspects play a central role within these articles. The management perspective on global warming seems to be equally important. Bigrams such as corporate strategy, strategic changes, risk management, strategy management, non-state actors, as well as Trigrams like corporate social responsibility are parts of the results. That might suggest that future responsibilities of business management will be to take ownership of the climate change challenges and environmental issues, to help create a more sustainable future.

Most of the business literature focuses on Business Adaptation, Actions and Responses to climate change by either analysing a certain case study or by providing examples that apply to different industries and sectors. Much of the business literature educates on the effects of climate change on businesses but also on the effects of businesses on climate change while greatly educating about climate change awareness and potential risks in the business sector and proposes new guidelines and frameworks to understand and tackle issues.

Feel free to read the paper here.