The alignment of companies' sustainability behavior and emissions with global climate targets.

Climate actions by the private sector are crucial to cutting global emissions and meeting the climate targets set by the Paris Agreement. However, despite an increasing number of climate pledges, the emissions pathways of most companies are still misaligned with the Paris targets. To identify the causes of this discrepancy between effort and outcome, we developed a systematic approach, based on extensive analyses of textual data, to track the actions implemented by major public corporations to reduce their emissions. Our findings suggest that the misalignment between companies' climate goals, actions, and outcomes is due to a widespread over-investment in risk mitigation actions as opposed to innovation and cooperation activities to foster energy goals. Overall, we provide a systematic framework to track companies' climate actions. Our approach can be used by investors and policymakers to redirect capital towards its most sustainable use and to design behaviourally founded climate policy interventions.

Organizational system thinking as a cognitive framework to meet climate targets.

System thinking is a crucial cognitive framework to enable individual pro-environmental behavioral changes. Indeed, a large body of literature has shown a significant and positive association between individuals' system thinking capacities and perceptions of the threat posed by climate change. However, individual behavioral changes play a limited role in addressing climate change compared to large organizations involved in a significantly larger share of economic activities. Do organizations exhibit system thinking capacities? Here, we conjecture that system thinking is a cognitive framework observable at an aggregated group level and, therefore, organizations, not just individuals, can exhibit characteristic levels of system thinking. We conceptualize a definition of organizational system thinking and develop an empirical method to estimate it using a large body of textual data from business organizations. Then, we show that system thinking organizations are more likely to lower emissions and align them with the pathways required to meet the climate targets set by the Paris Agreement. Finally, we discussed the theoretical and policy implication of our study. Overall, our results suggest that system thinking is a relevant organization-level cognitive framework that can help organizations align their emissions with global climate targets.