Speaking Science to Business
The devastating impacts of climate change are hitting billions hard: extreme weather, heatwaves, food and water insecurity, rising sea levels, disease exacerbation, humanitarian crises, and economic strains.
Climate change exacts a heavy toll, with its global cost amounting to $16.3 million every hour. The climate crisis doesn’t just hit wallets, it rattles supply chains and impacts economic activity on a global scale.
The stakes are high, not just economically but also for cities, communities, and the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Seven Key Business Functions
Businesses can use the sections below to explore the operational areas most relevant to them. Each section explains where climate and nature risks could show up, what they mean in practice, and what other businesses are already doing to respond.
Understand and Manage Climate & Nature Risks
Climate and nature risks become business risks when they affect something a business depends on. This could include a site, supplier, worker, raw material, transport route, energy source, customer base, or local community.
A practical way to understand these risks is to look at three things: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.
A useful starting point is to ask three questions:
- What is in harm’s way?
- How badly could the business be affected?
- How well could the business cope?
Together, these three areas help businesses move from a broad understanding of climate and nature risks to a clearer view of where they are most vulnerable, and which actions could make the greatest difference.
Exposure
Understanding how exposed business operations are to climate and nature risks helps identify where disruption is most likely to begin.
Sensitivity
Understanding sensitivity helps identify where a small disruption could have a significant impact. This impact can spread quickly through entire supply chains, amplifying systemic consequences far beyond the company's walls.
Adaptive Capacity
How effectively can a business prepare, respond, and recover. The plans, resources, relationships, data, and flexibility businesses need to prepare for, respond to, and recover from climate and nature-related risks.
Why Risk Assessment Matters
A good risk assessment helps a business understand where climate and nature risks could cause the biggest problems, and what to do first. It can help leaders identify:
- Which sites, suppliers, materials, or services are most exposed
- Which disruptions would be most costly or difficult to manage
- Where the business has few backup options
- Which actions would reduce risk most effectively
- Where investment, planning, or supplier engagement is needed
The aim is not just to list possible threats. A useful assessment gives the business a practical roadmap for reducing disruption, protecting value, and building resilience over time.
Resilience is Businesses Biggest Advantage
How do businesses affect climate and nature?
Businesses are affected by climate and nature risks, but they can also contribute to them. This can happen through the energy they use, the emissions they produce, the land and water they depend on, the materials they source, and the waste or pollution they create.
Understanding these impacts matters because they can also create business risk. They may lead to higher costs, new regulation, reputational damage, supply chain pressure, customer concern, or reduced access to finance.
Assessing a business’s climate and nature impacts helps leaders identify where harm is being caused, where future risks may be building, and where improvements could deliver the greatest value. It can also support better decisions on sourcing, operations, investment, and long-term resilience.
Help the Arctic, help humanity.
The Arctic plays a bigger role in the success of the 17 SDGs than has ever been considered. Loss of Arctic sea ice and snow cover drives global heating by 25-40%.
Warming in the Arctic causes impacts that extend far beyond its borders and carries significant economic costs. To achieve the SDGs we need the Arctic.
The unravelling poles is a global threat.
The polar regions are the control center for our climate system. Currently, the polar regions are warming at least four times faster than the global rate.
Polar change translates into extreme pressures on food and water security in the rest of the world, heat stress in cities and climate vulnerable regions, more extreme weather, sea level rise and supply chain disruptions.
Socio-economic impacts
There is growing scientific evidence that climate change leads to more severe, and more frequent, extreme weather events in most parts of the planet. It is well documented that increasingly hot and humid conditions – as measured by heat stress – adversely affect human health and work productivity. This has a negative impact on people’s livelihoods and wider economies.
Solutions
Solutions to Address Climate Change
Solutions for Businesses
Actions for Individuals
Want to make a real impact for the planet?
Arctic solutions
What You Can Do?
Resources
World Economic Forum Agenda Contributions
DAVOS 2017 talk with US vice president AL GORE
Davos business leader talks
Risk Webinar: Arctic Basecamp with Deloitte
Business on the Edge: Building Industry Resilience to Climate Hazards
Climate Risks Daily
See Today’s Climate Risks in Real Time
