Jonatan Pinkse, Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, has shared his thoughts on the impact of COVID-19 on climate change.
Writing for the Group for Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment (GRONEN), Professor Pinkse – Director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at Alliance MBS – asks whether COVID-19 will change how we think about climate change.
Because some businesses won’t survive the crisis this might lead to a dip in carbon emissions, he says, but the voids they leave will be “filled quite quickly by others”. As he writes: “For most other sectors, I’m afraid that it will be a return to business as usual. The economic downturn might well be a reason to park climate change again as an issue we’ll deal with later. The last financial crisis showed us as much.”
However Professor Pinkse does say that he “hopes and expects” that some of our new routines will stick. As he adds: “We now know that it is really not that difficult to reduce our business travel. We finally forced ourselves to explore the exciting world of online teaching and meetings. We have invested in the infrastructure and hopefully we will keep using it. Still, I’m not so sure that the coronavirus will turn out being the game-changer for climate change that we might be hoping for.”
You can read his blog here. GRONEN is an international network of engaged scholars researching various dimensions of management and the natural environment.
