Mitigating climate change – how do corporate strategies differ?

Abstract Many companies are facing increasing pressure by governments, shareholders and other stakeholders to reduce their CO 2 emissions in order to mitigate climate change. The importance of managing CO 2 emissions and crafting adequate CO 2 strategies has increased for those companies affected. We present a framework that conceptualizes a company's CO 2 strategy as the focus on one or a combination of several strategic objectives: CO 2 compensation, CO 2 reduction and carbon independence. In order to investigate the CO 2 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 CO 2 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 CO 2 strategies significantly differ in terms of regional affiliation, company size and absolute amount of CO 2 emissions, while we could not identify a significant difference in relative CO 2 emissions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.