Mitigating climate change – how do corporate strategies differ?

Many companies are facing increasing pressure by governments, shareholders and other stakeholders to reduce their CO₂ emissions in order to mitigate climate change. The importance of managing CO₂ emissions and crafting adequate CO₂ strategies has increased for those companies affected. We present a framework that conceptualizes a company's CO₂ strategy as the focus on one or a combination of several strategic objectives: CO₂ compensation, CO₂ reduction and carbon independence. In order to investigate the CO₂ strategies of a worldwide sample of 91 electricity producers we perform a content analysis of their answers to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). We demonstrate the measures the companies take to manage their emissions, the CO₂ strategies they adopt and antecedents that influence these strategies. We find that half of the companies take parallel emission management measures that aim at all three strategic objectives, while the other half pursue selected objectives only. We also find that companies with different CO₂ strategies significantly differ in terms of regional affiliation, company size and absolute amount of CO₂ emissions, while we could not identify a significant difference in relative CO₂ emissions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.