Gail Whiteman’s research while affiliated with University of Exeter and other places

Operating within safe and just Earth system boundaries requires mobilizing key actors across scale to set targets and take actions accordingly. Robust, transparent and fair cross-scale translation methods are essential to help navigate through the multiple steps of scientifc and normative judgements in translation, with clear awareness of associated assumptions, bias and uncertainties. Here, through literature review and expert elicitation, we identify commonly used sharing approaches, illustrate ten principles of translation and present a protocol involving key building blocks and control steps in translation. We pay particular attention to businesses and cities, two understudied but critical actors to bring on board.

Cities and companies have great potential to reduce pressures on Earth system boundaries. Science-based target setting has emerged as a powerful vehicle, but its uptake is still limited. Moreover, cities and companies develop their targets separately even though many large cities and companies colocate. Focusing on the top emitting 200 cities and 500 companies, here we analyse the current state and potential of adopting science-based targets for climate. Of these key actors, 110 cities and 22 companies with science-based targets can eliminate up to 3.41 GtCO2eq of annual emissions. Further, we argue that if cities and companies keep abreast of ambitious target levels, then this reduction potential can increase up to 5.70 GtCO2eq with a factor of 1.7. We provide an illustrative roadmap with entry points and discuss the implications. Our findings elucidate a previously untapped potential for catalysing city-company collaborations to accelerate transformations for operating within Earth system boundaries.

Researchers must help to define science-based targets for water, nutrients, carbon emissions and more to avoid cascading effects and stave off tipping points in Earth’s systems. Researchers must help to define science-based targets for water, nutrients, carbon emissions and more to avoid cascading effects and stave off tipping points in Earth’s systems.

Climate science provides strong evidence of the necessity of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. The IPCC 1.5°C special report (SR1.5) presents 414 emissions scenarios modelled for the report, of which around 50 are classified as '1.5°C scenarios', with no or low temperature overshoot. These emission scenarios differ in their reliance on individual mitigation levers, including reduction of global energy demand, decarbonisation of energy production, development of land-management systems, and the pace and scale of deploying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. The reliance of 1.5°C scenarios on these levers needs to be critically assessed in light of the potentials of the relevant technologies and roll-out plans. We use a set of five parameters to bundle and characterise the mitigation levers employed in the SR1.5 1.5°C scenarios. For each of these levers, we draw on the literature to define 'medium' and 'high' upper bounds that delineate between their 'reasonable', 'challenging' and 'speculative' use by mid century. We do not find any 1.5°C scenarios that stay within all medium upper bounds on the five mitigation levers. Scenarios most frequently 'over use' carbon dioxide removal with geological storage as a mitigation lever, whilst reductions of energy demand and carbon intensity of energy production are 'over used' less frequently. If we allow mitigation levers to be employed up to our high upper bounds, we are left with 22 of the SR1.5 1.5°C scenarios with no or low overshoot. The scenarios that fulfill these criteria are characterised by greater coverage of the available mitigation levers than those scenarios that exceed at least one of the high upper bounds. When excluding the two scenarios that exceed the SR1.5 carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5°C, this subset of 1.5°C scenarios shows a range of 15-22 Gt CO2 (16-22 Gt CO2 interquartile range) for emissions in 2030. For the year of reaching net zero CO2 emissions the range is 2039-2061 (2049-2057 interquartile range).

In a world facing catastrophic shocks, there are tremendous opportunities for management scholars to engage and make fundamental contributions to the grand challenges that lie ahead. To do so, our focus must move away from a theory-fetish toward a more applied action orientation that contributes to theory-building but does not make that its main or singular aim. In this paper, we argue, that our field’s primary research aim must not be to see how we can build theory out of a crisis, but rather how our organizational and management theories can contribute concretely to helping humanity prepare for and respond to these shocks and build long-term societal resilience. Furthermore, we argue that management scholars need to vigorously embrace a research agenda on sustainability focusing on deep engagement with practitioners to address grand challenges. To do so, we draw on experiences from our deep engagement with practitioners—an ethnographic study and a scientific activism effort. We offer several lessons and identify implications of deep engagement for impact within organization studies such as dedicated space in journals for impact cases.

In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo.