Informed by six dialogues with senior corporate leaders, the new report presents a strategic framework for strengthening corporate climate resilience.
Physical climate impacts are fundamentally reshaping the risk landscape for global businesses. Through six dialogues conducted in 2025, the Climate Resilience Foresight Series developed by Resilience First and C2ES brought together leaders from two dozen companies to explore how organisations can build comprehensive resilience to climate change. The Building Corporate Climate Resilience Report presents a strategic framework for corporate climate resilience, drawing on insights from participants across manufacturing, energy, technology, financial services, and other critical sectors.
The dialogues revealed that while awareness of climate risks has grown substantially, translating this awareness into sustained action remains challenging. Companies face genuine barriers, including competing priorities, data limitations, and governance structures not designed for long-term, systemic threats. Yet leading organisations are developing innovative approaches that frame resilience as a source of competitive advantage rather than merely a cost centre. As climate impacts accelerate, the companies that systematically build adaptive capacity will be best positioned to protect value, seize opportunities, and contribute to broader societal resilience.
About the Climate Resilience Foresight Series
The series applied Resilience First’s standards-aligned Model for Organisational Resilience, examining climate impacts across five essential organisational dimensions:
- Environment – Dependence on natural resources and ecosystem services
- Infrastructure and Operations – Built environment, supply chains and operational continuity
- Workforce – Employee health, safety and productivity
- Finance – Economic impacts, insurance and investment decisions
- Social and External Ecosystems – Community engagement and stakeholder relationships
Using the Model’s measurement-driven approach to resilience, participants identified business and service outcomes within each dimension that could be affected by climate shocks. Participants explored potential indicators to assess resilience and discussed initial ways to stress test these outcomes.
Following the culmination of the corporate dialogues, C2ES and Resilience First have produced a synthesis of the programme’s learnings, setting out short, medium and long-term actions organisations can take to strengthen their resilience to climate change, alongside recommendations for different role holders across organisations.
