Strategic planning in a new era of climate governance

Coordinating action is pivotal to achieving the objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change. It is through coordination that we can continue building a mutually reinforcing dynamic between national climate pledges, business strategy and public sentiment. This, in turn, can catalyse and maintain industrial transitions as well as generate new policy options for periodically increasing the ambition of national climate pledges. So a key challenge currently facing regulators, business and finance is how to align industrial and organisational strategies with the transition to zero-carbon economies.

This lecture will examine the practices that regulators, business and finance are starting to use to work towards this zero-carbon alignment. Many of these are in their infancy and they almost inevitably involve the repurposing and extension of existing policy and practice. In highlighting these developments and challenges, the lecture identifies common themes across these practices—from bridging temporal divides to tensions between quantitative and qualitative analysis—to outline the ongoing and unresolved issues in how global climate targets are operationalised across industries and organisations.

• Our guest speaker is Dr Robert Charnock, an Associate of the Lloyds Banking Group Centre for Responsible Business and a Lecturer in Accounting at the University of Birmingham, UK. He received his doctorate in 2016 from the London School of Economics and Political Science, with his thesis being based on a two-year engagement in a United Nations standard setting project that produced guidance on aligning financial markets with the transition to low-carbon economies.
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