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This paper discusses the role of companies in high-latitude regions which are conceptualized as socially and economically mediated ecosystems, and identifies a number of important social actors within the business environment. We present three examples of corporate activity at high latitudes and discuss a variety of common threads. Notably, we argue that business theory and practice needs to move beyond a narrow social or economic concept of organizational resilience and embrace the ecological resilience of high-latitude regions as a business management goal. We also suggest that regional ecosystem resilience needs to become a meaningful measure of sustainable corporate governance, one that corporate boards of directors can review and commit to. The paper concludes with a call for a detailed research agenda on the role of transnational and national companies within high-latitude regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the impacts of the melting of Arctic region and the release of methane gas from Arctic region on the global economy. It mentions that the costs of melting Arctic would be high because of its functional relation to earth systems including oceans and climate. It states that much of the cost will be generated by developing countries which are facing problems including extreme weather, poor health, and lower agricultural productivity.

The scientific literature on physical changes in the Arctic region driven by climate change is extensive. In addition, the emerging understanding of physical feedbacks and teleconnections between the Arctic and the rest of the world suggests that the warming in the Arctic region is likely to cause impacts that extend well beyond the region itself. However, there is only limited research on how Arctic change may affect economies and individual industry sectors around the world. We argue that there is a pressing need for more research on this topic and present a conceptual framework to guide future research for assessing the regional and global economic impacts of Arctic change, including both possible benefits and costs. We stress on the importance of a transdisciplinary approach, which includes an integration of the natural sciences, economics and social sciences, as well as engagement with a wide range of stakeholders to better understand and manage the implications of Arctic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented discussing the international response to a controversy involving automobile manufacturer Volkswagen and its efforts to manipulate emissions tests.

The article reviews the book "The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World" by William Nordhaus.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article regarding the role of business in dealing with environmental issues by Ricardo Bayon and Michael Jenkins in the 2010 issue.

Integrated reporting has fast emerged as a new accounting practice to help firms understand how they create value and be able to effectively communicate this to external stakeholders. While insightful experiences from the early-adopters of integrated reporting start to accumulate, the development of the field and how integrated reporting may be successfully implemented remains challenging and contested. Several issues are still controversial with no consensus reached on the central purpose about integrated reporting. This paper relies upon a qualitative approach to accomplish two objectives. First, we provide a review of the embryonic academic literature in the integrated reporting field in order to summarize extant knowledge. Second, in response to a gap in the literature on managerial perceptions concerning integrated reporting, we present the sensemaking approaches of three key experts impacting integrated reporting practices at the global level using semi-structured interviews. Our findings suggest that experts perceive the field to be fragmented and believe that most companies currently have weak understanding of the business value of integrated reporting. The experts give insights into how they perceive the field to be progressing despite challenges and on where they see improvements in the diffusion of practices in integrated reporting. Our study contributes to this special issue by reframing the existing implementation challenges of integrated reporting into promising and inclusive research opportunities that align the priorities of both academia and business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems inevitable that the ongoing and rapid changes in the physical environment of the marine Arctic will push components of the region's existing social-ecological systems-small and large-beyond tipping points and into new regimes. Ongoing changes include warming, freshening, acidification, and alterations to food web structure. In anticipation we pose three distinct but interrelated challenges: (1) to explore existing connectivities within components of the marine system; (2) to seek indicators (if they exist) of approaching regime change through observation and modeling; and (3) to build functional resilience into existing systems through adaptation-oriented policy and to have in hand transformative options when tipping points are crossed and new development trajectories are required. Each of the above challenges is scale dependent, and each requires a much deeper understanding than we currently have of connectivity within existing systems and their response to external forcing. Here, we argue from a global perspective the need to understand the Arctic's role in an increasingly nonlinear world; then describe emerging evidence from new observations on the connectivity of processes and system components from the Canada Basin and subarctic seas surrounding northern North America; and finally posit an approach founded in 'resilience thinking' to allow northern residents living in small coastal communities to participate in the observation, adaption and-if necessary-transformation of the social-ecological system with which they live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives have sought to unravel the high complexities of sustainability. A mature understanding of sustainability management requires studies to adopt a multidisciplinary systemic lens capable of appreciating the interconnectivity of economic, political, social and ecological issues across temporal and spatial dimensions. Yet the field of systems thinking in the context of sustainability management research is disparate and can benefit from a comprehensive review in order to assimilate the current fragmented body of research and to identify promising research directions. To address this gap, we conducted a review of the systems thinking and sustainability management literature from 1990 up to 2015 including 96 articles. In this review, we first present descriptives that show an emerging body of work rapidly growing since 2011. We found that 54 percent of articles were published in two transdisciplinary journals, demonstrating that a systemic approach is not yet prevalent in mainstream management journals. Second, we identify and describe the core theoretical concepts of systems thinking found in the literature including interconnections, feedbacks, adaptive capacity, emergence and self-organization. Third, findings show a number of research themes, including behavioral change, leadership, innovation, industrial ecology, social-ecological systems, transitions management, paradigm shifts and sustainability education. Finally we offer a cross-scale integrated framework of our findings, and conclude by identifying a number of promising research opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change and could jeopardise mitigation efforts. A release of carbon to the atmosphere from thawing permafrost results in a positive feedback. Similarly, the loss of sea ice and land snow increases solar absorption in high latitudes, creating a positive albedo feedback. A constant albedo feedback and zero permafrost feedback have been the legacy values used in nearly all climate policy studies. However, observations and models show that both feedbacks are nonlinear with the permafrost feedback being the stronger of the two. Here we use novel dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to estimate the impacts of including these nonlinear Arctic feedbacks on the global climate and economy under a range of scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement. In most scenarios the combination of the two nonlinear feedbacks causes extra warming globally compared with their legacy values. The permafrost carbon feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates while the albedo feedback is either similar to or weaker than the legacy values. The combination of these two factors increases the mean discounted economic effect of climate change by 4.1% ($25trillion) under the 1.5°C scenario, 5.6% ($34trillion) under the 2°C scenario, 4.8% ($67trillion) under levels of mitigation consistent with the current national pledges. Our findings support the need for more proactive mitigation measures to keep global temperature rise below 2°C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]