Corporate Climate Change Adaptation, Vulnerability and Environmental Performance in the United States Ski Resort Industry
Open AccessThis dissertation examines the relationships between Corporate Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptive Capacity, and Corporate Environmental Performance. It posits that these relationships merit attention because Corporate Climate Change Vulnerability can impact firms through their biophysical environments. To reduce this form of vulnerability, firms may deploy adaptations that affect their biophysical environments in ways that create harm in that domain. Similarly, firms' Climate Change Adaptive Capacity may also lead to negative impacts in that domain, because it reflects firms' capacity to reduce their vulnerability. Given that global climate change may, in the coming decades, significantly alter the environmental commons on which all life depends, it is important to understand whether firms' adaptations to the phenomenon can exacerbate global ecological change. The study is part of the emerging research area of Corporate Climate Change Adaptation. Scholarship in this area is currently focused on discovering how firms reduce vulnerability via adaptations, and how adaptive capacity helps to facilitate the adaptation process. Scholars have also identified some of the types of adaptation strategies and described some of the internal organizational processes that underpin firms' vulnerability, adaptive capacity and choice of adaptation strategy. The current study aims to extend this work, first by theorizing how external biophysical and socioeconomic influences can induce firms to generate impacts in their biophysical and socioeconomic environments, and then by developing empirical evidence regarding these linkages via quantitative analysis. The research questions guiding the study are:1) Do Corporate Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptive capacity significantly affect Biophysical Environmental Performance ? 2) And, do firms improve their Socioeconomic Environmental Performance to compensate for declining levels of Biophysical Environmental Performance that result from corporate climate change adaptation?This dissertation makes two additional contributions to the management literature. The first is to organizational theory. More specifically, it aims to extend resource dependence theory, by exploring the nature of firms' uncertainty in accessing critical ecological resources embedded in their biophysical environments. Currently, resource dependence theory focuses on explaining corporate attempts to manage resource dependence on resources that are traded or embedded in market and institutional environments. I argue that this theoretical extension is necessary to explain climate change adaptations, because the phenomenon involves corporate resource dependence created by ecological phenomena and resources. For this end, the dissertation describes some of the unique mechanisms associated with natural resource dependence, to complement the existing resource dependence theory framework and logic. Second, it addresses calls from scholars of corporate environmental performance to conduct studies that assess multiple dimensions of the construct simultaneously. This is important for at least two reasons. First, there is anecdotal evidence that some firms protect the environment in some ways and simultaneously harm it in others. Thus, studies that assess impacts in only one dimension of environmental performance can potentially yield unreliable results about firms' overall performance. In addition, some scholars believe that different dimensions of environmental performance can be systematically related. Some firms may perform well in most dimensions because they pursue proactive environmental strategies. Others may perform well in some dimensions and poorly in others, because they lack capacity to be comprehensively good, or because they are trying to compensate for poor performance in one dimension by doing well in another. By assessing the impacts of an independent event on multiple dimensions of corporate environmental performance, I will uncover evidence both of firms' comprehensive environmental performance and of systematic relationships between its different dimensions. The empirical study of the dissertation is set in the United States ski resort industry. This industry depends substantially upon climate, and many ski resorts have experienced Corporate Climate Change Vulnerability for many years. Thus, the industry could provide early evidence for the study of corporate climate change adaptation. Conducting the study within a single national industry can be advantageous, because it provides an element of statistical control with respect to the best available technology to firms for climate change adaptation, and to federal regulations governing environmental performance. Results showed that Corporate Climate Change Vulnerability is both negatively related to Biophysical Environmental Performance and positively related to Socioeconomic Environmental Performance. Results linking Corporate Climate Change Adaptive Capacity to Biophysical Environmental Performance were mixed. Specifically, Public Ownership is negatively and significantly related to this dependent variable; however, State Environmentalism and Regulator Resource Dependence are not. In addition, results linking Corporate Climate Change Adaptive Capacity to Socioeconomic Environmental Performance were also mixed. Specifically, Regulator Resource Dependence is positively related to Socioeconomic Environmental Performance; however, State Environmentalism and Public Ownership are not.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.