Business preferences for short term are hindering the response to climate change.
Recent research from Ivey Professor Tima Bansal and Natalie Slawinski, Assistant Professor, Strategic Management, Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University of Newfoundland, looks at the long-term benefits for oil sands companies addressing climate-change issues.
Although investments in this area, such as carbon capture and storage, won’t pay off for about 20 years, the long-term benefits of curbing emissions and influencing other companies are enormous for business and society.
“In the short term, firms make tradeoffs between social, environmental and economic issues,” says Bansal, who is also Director of Ivey’s Centre for Building Sustainable Value and Executive Director of the Network for Business Sustainability at Ivey.
“In the long term, these issues converge. Firms will only survive if they’re good to the people around them and good to the environment.”
Their report, “Thinking Long Term: Climate Change and the Oil and Gas Industry,” also identifies eight best practices for companies to tackle various social and environmental issues.
Bansal stresses firms need to embrace uncertainty and envision the future to become sustainable. The role of time within organizations is critical to understanding business sustainability. She cites Suncor as a company that is leading change with carbon capture and storage technology.
“(Leading firms) anchor their worlds in the future and say, ‘what do we do now to realize that future?'” says Bansal. “Suncor has an anchor into both the past and future. It looks into the future and asks, ‘how do we make sure we’ll be here for a long time?'”
Details of the research were released today in the June edition of impact, an online monthly publication featuring new research from faculty at the Richard Ivey School of Business. To read the full article, click here.
The full report is available here.
Murray Bryant, Associate Professor of Managerial Accounting & Control and director of the London and Southwestern region Local Health Integration Network, also discusses the benefits of leadership management in health care. For the full article, click here.