| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Ariana Randal artennis301@tamu.edu Environmental Studies |
| Faculty Mentor: | Jayme Walenta, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Summer 2016 (complete) |
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Team Size:
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3 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Possible co-authorship on peer review publication Opportunity to attend conference to present research results |
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Team Needs:
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Interests: Climate change policy and sustainable business practices Skills: Excel; Attention to detail |
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Description:
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This project builds from an existing base of research that addresses how the voluntary carbon market in the United States governs climate change. Currently, much climate governance in the United States is undertaken not by government oversight and regulation, but instead by corporations under pressure by investors to act. Previous research has noted that in their efforts to address climate change, U.S. based corporations exhibit a tendency to invest in climate governance at or near corporate headquarters, rather than along corporate value chains (where many greenhouse gas emissions occur). The research for this project questions how or whether trends in corporate climate governance shift given where a company is headquartered. The research team will investigate the corporate climate governance actions taken by companies located in France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China. The goal is to make comparisons between how U.S. based companies engage climate change versus corporations based in other countries, particularly those countries where strong government oversight exists. We will ask, do corporations headquartered in climate friendly nations tend to invest in climate governance near to them (as do US based companies)? Or, do corporate climate governance strategies shift to consider value chain emissions? To undertake this research, team members will examine the publicly available climate change disclosures of major corporations based in the aforementioned countries, cataloging the emissions profiles of those firms, as well as documenting the spatial distribution of climate governance strategies. |