Sustainability and economic crisis : Scenario strategies for a sustainability driven company

Sammanfattning: This thesis addresses the challenges and opportunities of sustainability driven companies during the time of crisis in 2020. The company Green City Solutions is used as a case study company in the field of air pollution. While sustainability orientation has been seen as a nice- to-have in the past, its perceived importance is projected to suffer in economic crises and recessions. With a scenario planning methodology, the goal was to understand the trends and drivers that dominate the current narrative, how they changed since the beginning of the crisis and how they are projected to evolve during and after the upcoming recession. The trends developed in this work show a clear trend towards more sustainability thinking also during the crisis, mainly seen in the German and EU’s stimulus packages, but also in an increased sensibility in the public and companies that has not been seen in any crisis before. The resulting future scenarios evolve around the discrepancy of knowledge and action in consumers as well as politics. The potential manifestations in the future are a purely rational consumer versus a consumer that is sustainably enlightened on the one side, and conservative versus transformative politics on the other side. The strategies for sustainability driven companies derived from the different future scenarios can be categorised into need creation and education, business model expansion and customer group expansion. The main takeaway is the need for clearer communication and education in the field of sustainability and especially clean air in a time that offers the sensibility for the topic in the public.