What is Essential?
Sarah Birrell Ivory

What is Essential? This is a question my family and I have asked many times in recent weeks, as Covid-19 forces us to reconsider both the meaning of that word, and the values that drive different people’s answers. Collectively, as a society, asking this question has led to us facing some fairly uncomfortable truths about…

Resilience in Uncertain Times
Martina Linnenluecke

As many of you know, I research resilience, that is, the capacity of individuals, organisations and communities to recover from substantial adversity. In this essay, I offer some of my own experiences and observations, and hope that they can contribute to tackling major global challenges such as the Covid-19 health emergency and climate change. I…

Coronavirus And Global Supply Chain Disruption: A Wake-Up Call For Climate Policy?
Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash

Coronavirus has slowed down economic activity and temporarily reduced China’s carbon emissions. However, there is a deeper implication for climate policy: decarbonization depends on global supply chains for inputs required for electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. In 2015, solar and wind contributed to about 7% of global electricity.  Their salience is projected to increase…

Learning to Carry the Cat by the Tail
What we know about business response to disasters and how that relates to the COVID-19 crisis
Jennifer Oetzel & Chang Hoon Oh

Is it possible for businesses to manage such a seemingly “unmanageable” problem as COVID-19? We have been researching multinational enterprises’ responses to natural disasters and political risks for two decades now and the answer is a qualified yes. A key finding of our research is that local knowledge (e.g, community or regional knowledge about available resources…