Corporate Organic Growth, Sustainability and Fulfilment of Climate Goals: A Transdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change establishes guidelines for the performance of companies in relation to emissions reduction, governance, and disclosure through the Climate Action 100+ Net Zero Company Benchmark. As a result, companies in all signatory countries are obliged to reduce their emissions and consumption of non-renewable forms of energy by 2050. Since this agreement affects all industries globally, every company needs to establish their own internal procedures to achieve the established targets. Securing new forms of sustainable energy supply results is a new challenge for companies and additional transaction costs with potential effects on profitability and thus shareholder value. As a method to maintain shareholder value, companies have therefore sought to offset resulting higher costs with organic sales growth. The contribution of this paper is to investigate the link between organic sales growth in a large publicly traded multinational and its implementation of renewable energy policies prioritizing best practices in sustainable value chains, while fulfilling climate goals and the correspondent social impact helping to reduce environmental burden. The stakeholders involved include consumers, companies, government and NGOs. This paper aligns with historical topics of interest to the Transdisciplinary Engineering community, including research and systems analysis, product and process design, decision support tools, and management. In conclusion, this article proposes a transdisciplinary exploration that highlights the shift towards renewable energies in the manufacturing and supply chain processes of consumer goods.