ABSTRACT
Africa is the world’s most vulnerable region to climate change despite being the least contributor to carbon emissions and global warming. This chapter discusses the challenges climate change poses to African countries, including the adverse effects of ecological variations on agriculture, health, national security, livelihoods, and poverty reduction. Positioning climate change as a business issue, this chapter also delineates how global warming poses challenges for the private sector and critiques the sector’s ‘business-as-usual’ response as problematic, especially in Africa. Consequently, this chapter calls for businesses to move away from an instrumental approach towards an altruistic perspective in the way CSR is conceived and deployed to tackle environmental issues, and draws from four dimensions of corporate citizenship to present climate change as a core CSR issue. In doing so, this chapter explicates and presents suggestions about how corporations’ fulfilment of their economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities can help to protect the natural environment, reduce global warming, and support climate change mitigation while also creating conditions that enhance their profitability and competitive advantage.
