A Concise Business Guide to Climate Change: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know

Understanding the ground rules of climate change for business.

Climate has changed the game for businesses around the world. With climate-related disasters costing billions in damages and public pressure rising, over a hundred nations joined the 2015 Paris Agreement, setting 2050 as the target for net-zero carbon emissions. Thousands of companies have registered with the Carbon Disclosure Project. In a recent survey of large, global firms, one-third reported that climate change was already affecting their operations.

Business leaders need help navigating this complex, fast-changing environment. Amid a flood of new policies and information, how can you tell what news matters and what impact it will have? Which arguments and reports are grounded in sound science and economics and which are not?

This indispensable guidebook by Harvard Business School professor and policy expert Gunnar Trumbull answers this need. As managers around the world confront the reality of climate change and educate themselves about how it is affecting their businesses, A Concise Business Guide to Climate Change provides a single, short, and accessible account of the information crucial to understanding and addressing these challenges. What causes climate change? How do countries and companies measure their own impact on global climate? What is the role of carbon markets? How are governments responding? What kind of corporate emissions targets make sense, and how can they be achieved? In crisp, reader-friendly, and data-rich chapters, Trumbull presents the basic scientific, economic, policy, and accounting frameworks that managers need in order to answer these questions.

Effective as an overview or as a reference on specific challenges, this book is your go-to business guide for dealing with climate change.

Gunnar Trumbull is the Phillip Caldwell Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His research and publications have focused on regulatory policy, and he also has a background in the geosciences. He teaches the MBA course "Global Climate Change," which he launched in spring 2022. Before coming to HBS, he helped found the nonprofit organization GeoHazards International, which assists countries and municipalities in responding to environmental risks.