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Climate change is a key grand challenge of our time. To minimise the effects of climate change, countries around the world are under increasing pressure to reduce their carbon emissions and transition towards more sustainable economies and societies. Firms are key climate actors. They are responsible for a significant share of the global carbon emissions. For example, as noted by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP 2017), the top 100 fossil-fuel-producing companies account for circa 71 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, firms play a key role in developing and adopting technologies that can enable meeting societal and economic goals, in a more sustainable way. Despite this, our understanding of how firms are affected by, and respond to climate change, remains very limited.

The PhD research seeks to address this gap in existing knowledge, by focusing on three key interrelated issues determining how firms are affected by, and respond to, the process of climate change: (1) The impacts of climate change on firms’ Research and Development (R&D) activities; (2) The impact of R&D policy instruments (supports) on driving improved environmental performance in firms; and (3) The extent to which digital skills shortages deter firms from improving their environmental performance. The research builds on unprecedented access to firm-level data, and administrative information on the R&D policy instruments available to firms in Ireland. Building on strong theoretical underpinnings, the research is empirical in nature and applies state-of-the-art econometric techniques.

The research seeks to generate novel and robust insights into critical issues influencing the extent to which firms engage in climate action. Such insights are highly policy-relevant, as they can usefully inform current and future policy efforts to encourage firms to engage in climate action and meet national and global climate goals.