Climate change and marketing: Stranded research or a sustainable development?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1893
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Author: C. Michael Hall

COMMENTARY

Climate change and marketing: Stranded research or a

sustainable development?

C. Michael Hall

Department of Management, Marketing and

Entrepreneurship, University of Canterbury,

Christchurch, New Zealand

Correspondence

C. Michael Hall, Department of Management,

Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of

Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch,

New Zealand 8140.

Email: michael.hall@canterbury.ac.nz

Climate change represents an existential crises for economic, social, and natural sys-

tems. Given the significance of the topic and the importance of behavioural change,

it might be expected that marketing may be a substantial contributor to climate

change studies. However, this is not the case with substantially less than 1% of papers

in a sample of marketing journals being concerned with climate change. Nevertheless,

there is substantial interest in marketing practices and climate change outside of mar-

keting journals. It is therefore posited that, as a discipline, marketing may potentially

become a form of stranded research in the social science of climate change rather

than a positive sustainable contribution to emissions reduction and consumer studies.

It is also observed that a shift in focus from carbon literacy to the carbon capabilities

of consumers presents a significant challenge to marketing assumptions about agency

and structure and the relative roles of upstream and downstream marketing and the

ethics of marketing practice.

1|INTRODUCTION

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; 2018) report

on global warming of 1.5°C provides a stark warning of the need for

keeping levels of global warming to 1.5°C and the implications

between global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C above preindustrial levels.

With a high degree of confidence, the IPCC states that “Global

warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it

continues to increase at the current rate”(IPCC, 2018, A1). In the

language of the IPCC, future climate‐related risks will be “larger if

global warming exceeds 1.5°C before returning to that level by 2100

than if global warming gradually stabilizes at 1.5°C, especially if the

peak temperature is high (e.g., about 2°C; high confidence). Some

impacts may be long‐lasting or irreversible, such as the loss of some

ecosystems (high confidence)”(IPCC, 2018, A3.2). Risks include more

extreme weather, sea level rise and ocean acidification, and detrimen-

tal effects on agriculture, biodiversity, human health, and water avail-

ability. The highly conservative nature of the IPCC report (Resplandy

et al., 2018), also meant that the systemic implications for economic

and political stability were not discussed in detail, nor the implications

of so‐called “tipping points”in the earth's biological and climatic

systems, beyond which impacts become unstoppable, irreversible or

even accelerate. These include spatio‐temporal shifts in the

occurrence of monsoons, the halting of the gulf stream, and the col-

lapse of ice‐sheets, all of which would have enormous economic and

social repercussions.

Despite the conclusions expressed by scientific bodies with

respect to the effects of climate change, there remains enormous

political marketing and public affairs concerns with respect to the

framing of climate change arguments and knowledge as well as the

activities of interest groups in influencing the public policy making

process. Such concerns are accentuated by claims by some sceptics

and deniers that anthropogenic climate change is theoretical, for

example, “based on the theory that human‐sourced greenhouse gas

emissions are the primary cause of warming temperatures during

much of the industrial age”(Olson, 2018, p. 299; this author's empha-

sis). Although no single peer‐reviewed publication on climate change,

or any other scientific issue, should be accepted without due scrutiny,

the existence of a scientific consensus, especially one as overwhelm-

ing as exists for human‐induced climate change, raises the level of

confidence that the overall findings of that consensus are correct (Hall

et al., 2015). However, a scientific consensus on the reality of anthro-

pogenic climate change does not mean that there is no critical debate

(Hulme, 2009). There is substantial debate over many aspects of cli-

mate change science, not only with respect to levels of confidence

and uncertainty, but also the paradigms and frameworks within, which

Received: 4 November 2018 Accepted: 7 November 2018

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1893

J Public Affairs. 2018;18:e1893.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1893

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of7