Climate risk and opportunity for boards

Business Climate Resilience 🌎 Climate-related disruptions are increasing in frequency and severity, creating material risks for business operations, supply chains, and local communities. Addressing these challenges requires a structured and forward-looking approach to climate resilience. The World Economic Forum presents a framework that outlines ten key actions across three pillars: enhancing resilience, capitalizing on opportunities, and shaping collaborative outcomes. These actions are designed to help organizations avoid economic loss, drive sustainability-linked value, and strengthen systemic responses. Enhancing resilience involves asset-level climate hazard mapping, crisis response planning, and contingency strategies for workforce productivity during extreme weather. Addressing single points of failure and diversifying service delivery and supply chain models is essential to minimize operational disruption. Capturing new opportunities requires understanding long-term consumption shifts, adapting local business models, and directing R&D toward sustainable materials, circular models, and resilient infrastructure. Climate-smart portfolio strategies can position climate adaptation as a source of competitive advantage. Systemic resilience depends on coordinated action across the value chain. Collaboration with public, private, and grassroots stakeholders can unlock shared value frameworks, support regenerative practices, and enable the deployment of early warning systems and nature-based financial mechanisms. To operationalize these priorities, businesses are encouraged to activate key enablers within 24 months. These include integrating climate risk into enterprise risk management, conducting detailed audits of capabilities, and aligning capital investment decisions with resilience objectives. Data intelligence, scientific partnerships, and responsible use of technology—particularly AI—will be critical to improve foresight, enable adaptive planning, and enhance the quality of strategic decision-making in the context of escalating climate volatility. #sustainability #sustainable #business #esg

Boards are being watched like never before. ESG reporting is now a mandate, and many directors admit they’re not ready. Investors, regulators, and stakeholders demand transparency on climate, sustainability, and governance risks. One misstep, and boards face reputational damage, shareholder pushback, or even legal scrutiny. Consider a scenario where your company is preparing its first climate disclosure aligned with ISSB standards. The board is expected to validate the report, but most directors lack deep familiarity with climate metrics. Decisions about targets, measurement, and reporting processes suddenly feel high stakes. Even minor misstatements can trigger questions from regulators or activists. Boards that handle this well don’t just react, they plan proactively. They bring in external expertise, dedicate sessions to understanding ESG risks, and integrate sustainability into broader strategy discussions. Confidence grows not through technical mastery but through informed governance and structured questioning. ✅ Practical tip:  Schedule a dedicated ESG board session each quarter with clear objectives:  👉 understand data sources, 👉  verify assumptions 👉 challenge management on disclosures. 💬 How confident is your board in reviewing ESG reporting? Are you running to catch up or leading with purpose? 🌐 For practical frameworks and guidance: https://lnkd.in/gx6xkUAZ 👥 Connect with Randall on LinkedIn to swap insights: https://lnkd.in/gY5vZJef ▶️ Real-world ESG boardroom discussions on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/dURdpwW7

𝐄𝐒𝐆𝐢𝐧𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐔𝐧𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 (https://lnkd.in/eyKJ5ZNE) With all eyes on the global sustainability regulatory landscape – in particular the expected next steps with the EU’s Omnibus Simplification Package – climate transition plans are increasingly looked to as a strategic and risk management tool to help companies, investors, regulators, and many others understand, analyze, act, and communicate around the rapid transition to a lower-carbon, higher physical risk global economy. Beyond disclosure and regulatory mandates, transition plans articulate the entity's response to climate change risks and opportunities and demonstrate how they manage potential impacts on their business models and strengthen long-term financial and economic resilience. As organizations look to accelerate strategic and risk objectives, balanced with regulatory requirements, climate transition plans can strengthen organizational commitment, enhance transparency, and drive risk protection. Transition plans can serve as an essential tool in unlocking capital and financial resources needed to drive greater shifts to sustainability, with credible, well-defined pathways aligned to the business strategy. 🔑 Key themes from our recent discussion with David Carlin: ✍ CEOs and CFOs are realizing that investors and other stakeholders may lose confidence in climate targets unless they are accompanied by a transition plan. It’s the transition plan that makes the targets credible (https://lnkd.in/eC-Xq37K), because it can demonstrate that your company is not only aware of climate risks, but has a concrete, actionable road map to address those risks, align strategy to a lower-carbon economy, and understand the related financial choices and implications. ⚙ [Transition Plans are…] a chance for CFOs who increasingly have responsibility for incorporating material sustainability data into financial reporting, to also help establish clarity around the way sustainability efforts deliver ROI to the top line and bottom line. 💡There’s a false dichotomy between traditional strategic planning and climate transition planning. It’s clear that the low-carbon transition is underway. Instead of having separate climate and strategic plans, … ultimately the two will merge into a consolidated strategic annual plan that companies will use to adapt their business models in a transition that, like it or not, is well underway.    #deloitteesgnow