Climate Change and Business Management

The 21st Century is witnessing dramatic climatic changes and impacts upon society and business. In addition, the world is losing its biodiversity at an alarming rate and global pollution is presenting increasing threats to human health. The consequence for the modern business organization is that the profit maximization focus is becoming challenged by a need to balance this aspiration with the need to remain as a legitimate business in the eyes of the public. In terms of businesses, enterprises must seal their ultimate goal - maximizing profit - with environmental protection because "consumers concern about global climate change within the context of sustainable consumption" (Newman et al. 2012, p. 511). The structures of supply chains, specifically, are believably one of the most vulnerable elements to environmental changes that managers must be aware of and deeply analyzing. Traditional thoughts from the predecessors are usually employed to solve all managerial problems. Such remedies, however, must be further examined to suitable applied in this currently material world.

The climate change will transform the value chains in various perspectives. Firstly, manufacturing plants will not depend on one stand-alone energy anymore but a system of low-carbon energies will take place which means that the way of using and distributing energy will be totally different. As reported by IPCC (2014, p. 10), natural energies consisted of over 12.9% of the total amount of energies generated in 2008 and this figure has been continuingly increasing since then, which means that a whole new chain of energy producing and distributing will be gradually established. Secondly, companies nowadays have re-evaluated the relationships with their major producers because most business activities are now relatively vulnerable to climatic change. Australia's farming, for example, is highly sensitive to such change which also believably increases the degree of mental pressures (West and Brereton 2013, pp. 14-15) and when Haiyan - the typhoon - appeared, a serious storages was happening globally, US was a typical illustration where 6% of all US production depends on the Philippines (Levermann, 2014). Consequently, a rising number of manufactures are looking for a closer place to distribute their products rather than wasting fuels for transporting final goods to the point of consuming and instead of using merely raw materials; they are now finding ways to reuse their