Introduction

Climate change is one of the environmental issues that has increasingly attracted business attention in the course of the 1990s. While public and policy interest had already started in the late 1980s, leading to a first international agreement at the Rio conference in 1992, the main driver for corporate strategic change was the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. This event spurred the development of regulation and increased the pressure from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on governments to ensure ratification of the Protocol, and on companies, which were urged to take appropriate steps to address global warming.