ABSTRACT
Even as climate science has solidified, companies have been hearing for years that they don’t need to know much about climate change science, they just need to recognize that ‘the climate policy train is leaving the station, and we want to be on it’. This ‘policy paradigm’ of climate risk assumes that policy and regulation are the primary contributors to corporate climate risk, rather than climate change itself, and encourages policy-oriented risk responses. Some 25 years after initial calls for broad-based GHG emissions reductions, agreement on climate change policy to accomplish the reductions has proven an almost impossible nut to crack through domestic legislation or international negotiations. With the failure of national climate change legislation in the US, and the anticipated failure of international efforts to extend a meaningful version of the Kyoto Protocol, many companies are asking themselves.
