Climate change and socio-environmental accounting in agri-food supply chains: a systematic review and future directions

Climate change is a highly debated topic across various disciplines due to its multidimensional nature, the challenges in defining it, and the scope of study and intervention related to it (Grasso and Markowitz, 2015). As pointed out by Pielke (2004), there are at least two main definitions of “climate change” provided by leading international institutions: the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The FCCC defines climate change as “a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity, that alters the composition of the global atmosphere, and that is in addition to natural climate variability over comparable time periods” (United Nations, 1992, p. 7); the IPCC defines it as “a change in the state of the climate that can be identified … by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer” (IPCC, 2007). These two definitions reflect different approaches on both the political side and scientific side, and the IPCC has a broader definition of climate change that includes any changes in climate over time, independent of the natural (variability) or human (activity) causes. Disputes regarding the terminology itself—“climate change”—involve even the scientific justification because climate and weather constantly change (Koutsoyiannis, 2021).