Abstract

"Business Inaction. The International Chamber of Commerce and Responses to Climate Change 1970s to the Early 1990s"

Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Umeå University (ann-kristin.bergquist@ekhist.uu.se)

Business responsibility in addressing climate change and business impact on global climate governance have over the past decades grown into a multifaceted field of research. This study engages the literature that have looked at the historical response to climate change among industries positioned to have had a far-reaching impact on changing the course of the climate crisis. While much of the historical research in this domain has focused on the role of big oil companies in the manufacturing of doubt regarding the legitimacy of climate science – which has slowed global climate mitigation efforts – our focus is on the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) – the worlds’ largest transnational business association. In 1970s and the 1980s, the ICC developed a close collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). During the same period, UNEP emerged as the anchor organisation in global environmental governance and eventually also formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) together with the Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988. Given the qualified environmental expertise that was accumulated within the ICC's own expert organs, and via the intergovernmental networks of which the ICC was a part of (Bergquist & David, 2022). The overarching research question underpinning this study thus concerns why this delay – or inaction – took hold within the ICC and what implication this delay had on UNEP’s capacity to create a strong global coalition to act on climate change at UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio in 1992. The study also analyzes more deeply the strategies that the ICC developed to respond to the climate issue from the end of the 1980s until Rio.