Chapter 1 introduces the central puzzle of the book: how multinational corporations confront the growing risks and opportunities of climate change. It establishes the urgency and global salience of the issue, situating the discussion within international business and political economy scholarship. The chapter reviews existing literature, identifies key knowledge gaps, and formulates the research questions that guide the study. It then presents the book’s overarching analytical framework, integrating resource dependence theory with a typology of climate risks and corporate response strategies. By linking firm-level decision-making to national capacity and international engagement, this introduction explains how the subsequent chapters contribute to theory and practice. It concludes by highlighting the book’s dual purpose: to advance academic understanding of business strategy under climate stress and to draw actionable lessons for policymakers and business leaders.

Chapter 11 concludes the book by synthesizing its central arguments and highlighting broader implications for business, policy, and scholarship. It reiterates four key themes: first, climate change management and economic growth are not inherently at odds, second, climate change creates both risks and opportunities for multinational corporations (MNCs), third, climate pressures are reshaping firms’ resource dependencies, and fourth, MNCs can play pivotal roles in advancing climate solutions. The chapter reflects on the book’s contributions to international business, development studies, and global political economy. It also outlines the study’s limitations and identifies promising avenues for future research. The book concludes with a call for action, urging public and private actors to embrace innovation, cooperation, and long-term planning to achieve sustainable prosperity and advance climate solutions.

I present the first of three possibilities for the future of economic development and inequality. In this scenario, the rich continue to get richer, leaving the rest of us behind. I describe four implications of this continued concentration of wealth. First, the super-rich will continue to disproportionately influence politics, furthering fragmentation and polarization in society and deepening civic discontent. Second, economic inequality will amplify ill-health. Third, poverty will persist despite increased aggregate prosperity. Fourth, the climate will continue to deteriorate to our collective detriment. This dystopian possibility underscores the urgency of imagining and pursuing alternative futures.

The expression of military power—whether through armed combat or through peacetime development and training—is inherently environmental, just as it is inherently social, and yet scholars tend to separate the natural from the cultural when it comes to studying martial activity. This chapter explores a variety of ways war, society, and environment intersect in the U.S. context and makes a case for better integrating the methods of environmental history into the study of war and society. It takes a thematic rather than chronological approach, not only to highlight the ubiquity of nature across all military activities, but to draw attention to both continuities and ruptures in the ways Americans and their armed forces have interacted with nature over time. This includes how global environmental change has influenced the mission of the American armed forces and their outlook on the future. Nature has influenced and guided American military actions, just as it has shaped American social and political developments, and we must take nature seriously in our discussions of war and society if we are to achieve a full understanding of the dynamics of human conflict.

The expression of military power—whether through armed combat or through peacetime development and training—is inherently environmental, just as it is inherently social, and yet scholars tend to separate the natural from the cultural when it comes to studying martial activity. This chapter explores a variety of ways war, society, and environment intersect in the U.S. context and makes a case for better integrating the methods of environmental history into the study of war and society. It takes a thematic rather than chronological approach, not only to highlight the ubiquity of nature across all military activities, but to draw attention to both continuities and ruptures in the ways Americans and their armed forces have interacted with nature over time. This includes how global environmental change has influenced the mission of the American armed forces and their outlook on the future. Nature has influenced and guided American military actions, just as it has shaped American social and political developments, and we must take nature seriously in our discussions of war and society if we are to achieve a full understanding of the dynamics of human conflict.

In this chapter we analyse a corpus of climate-related tweets from ‘Australian Twitter’ (now ‘X’) collected between late 2019 and early 2022. The study aimed to discover whether the language of left-leaning and right-leaning users aligns with the language of climate change advocates and deniers. Method triangulation is used, first analysing language variation among the two groups using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), then analysing such variation using keywords analysis. The MCA indicates that the two groups are not differentiated with respect to their grammatical style and that they are internally diverse. However, the keywords analysis uncovers several linguistic differences between the two groups. These are associated with discursive practices such as scientific (de-)legitimation and calls to action, which align with ideological stance around climate change. Thus, the analyses confirm that different practices are adopted in relation to political-ideological usage trends. In addition, the differing results from the two methods highlight the importance of triangulating corpus linguistic techniques in the study of usage variation.

The 1972 Stockholm Conference marked the emergence of transnational environmental law, with states agreeing on commitments towards a healthy environment. While the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment may have been progressive and innovative at that time, it made no explicit mention of women, girls, or gender equality. Instead, women and girls were subsumed within the category of ‘man’. Through legal interpretation and analysis of policy documents, this chapter maps important progress made in the last 50 years. The article uncovers the untold story of women international lawmakers from the global South not only in advances on women’s rights but also in international law relevant to healthy social-ecological systems more broadly. The article finds that decoupling the notion of vulnerability from weakness and powerlessness and coupling it with agency and solidarity is needed if international law is going to tackle head on the biodiversity, climate change, pollution and water crises and effectively enable Earth stewardship.

The past three quarters of a century have witnessed humanity remake the planet on which it lives, but also begin to imagine better and worse ways in which this process might proceed. So, science fiction has acquired a peculiar centrality to Anthropocene culture. As Amitav Ghosh explains, climate change is a fundamentally collective process, whereas the dominant Western culture is one “in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.” So, “serious prose fiction” has become overwhelmingly committed to versions of literary realism that depend for their efficacy on notions of everyday probability. By contrast, extreme climate change – and the Anthropocene more generally – necessarily involve everyday improbabilities. Radical improbabilities have therefore been banished from “literary fiction” into the “generic outhouses” of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. In short, the Anthropocene has itself generated the wave of recent anthropogenic eutopias and dystopias. The chapter concludes by endorsing Kim Stanley Robinson’s view that “utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy.”

Protecting human rights and safeguarding the environment, along with maintaining peace and security, are fundamental values of modern international society. The first two topics emerged as matters of international concern several decades apart, and the earlier development of human rights law encouraged international lawyers and activists as early as the 1972 Stockholm Conference to explore and attempt to understand the interrelationship between human rights and environmental protection. As this understanding has grown, the two fields have increasingly interacted. Since the Stockholm Conference, constitutional provisions and related litigation on environmental rights have spread around the globe. At the same time, differences in goals and priorities have demonstrated the obstacles to merging them or integrating either subject entirely into the framework of the other. The current focus on climate change has been accompanied by new efforts to enforce environmental goals that impact the enjoyment of human rights.

This chapter takes stock of the evolution of the trade-environment nexus, focusing on the legal protection of the atmosphere. It offers a brief historical overview of the trade-environment debate, zooming in on the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. It then discusses the rationale, functioning, and legality of (1) multilateral trade measures incorporated in the 1987 Montreal Protocol and (2) unilateral trade measures adopted with a view to protecting the climate. The main conclusion is that, while much has changed since the Stockholm Conference – with new international legal regimes coming into being and many more trade-related environmental measures being adopted – some things have stayed the same, with North-South tensions continuing to form the main backdrop for trade-environment interactions and continuing uncertainty about the forum in which these interactions should be addressed.

This chapter explores the progressive development of international biodiversity law, from the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment to 2022. It shows that some of the most forward-looking concepts enshrined in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration have guided the progressive development of international biodiversity law for 50 years, notably the need for cosmopolitan cooperation that takes into account distributive justice issues and human rights. Still, the sectoral and largely incremental approach of the Stockholm Declaration no longer fits in addressing the urgent triple planetary crises that we face. Rather, a transformative change is needed. International biodiversity law, in its interactions with human rights, can contribute to such a change, by focusing on environmental and social justice issues, by ensuring that solutions, including climate change response measures, have sustainable impacts at other scales and in other sectors, and by empowering those whose interests are not being met and represent transformative sustainability values.

This chapter explores the progress of international climate law since the 1972 Stockholm Conference. Climate change threatens the very kind of massive and irreversible harm to the environment that the conference sought to prevent. The chapter shows first that customary international law, while imposing harm prevention obligations on states, has not kept pace with the global, intertemporal, and developmental dimensions of climate change. The chapter then offers a brief account of the evolution of the global climate regime launched by the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As the discussion will illustrate, 30 years later, the regime continues to wrestle with the complexities of the climate challenge, including difficult burden-sharing questions and the fraught relations between North and South. The 2015 Paris Agreement, which introduced a new approach to international climate governance, is a response to these complexities