Climate Resilience Pathways: Catalyzing private sector action
The innovations and investments businesses make can be pivotal in fortifying and transforming operations, supply chains, and communities to prepare for and adapt to climate threats.
As climate-related risks loom large over the global economy, no business remains untouched. The compounding impacts of climate change are reshaping the global business landscape and will continue to do so even with significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, demanding immediate and strategic action from the private sector.
Together with partners, we are embarking on a pioneering multi-year initiative to establish a robust business framework that enables companies to build climate resilience, disclose corporate actions, and track leadership and impact.
Resilience First, Resilience Rising and The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) have launched the Corporate Climate Resilience Pathways Initiative, which aims to empower companies to enhance their resilience and contribute to a global ecosystem of resilient business practices. As the backbone of the global economy, businesses play a pivotal role in driving forward resilience and mitigating the dire impacts of climate change. Together, we have published a new report and crafted a set of guiding principles aimed at inspiring decisive, private-sector action.
Working Principles for Corporate Climate Resilience Leadership
Together with cross-sector stakeholders, we’ve developed guiding principles that reflect how companies can demonstrate leadership in advancing resilience to the physical impacts of climate change.
Download the report and principles here
Building on two decades of industry experience in measuring greenhouse gas emissions and setting climate targets, the private sector has been able to compete, attract investment, and engage in policy discussions to drive decarbonisation. Similar dynamics are required to elevate business action on climate resilience, ensuring a thriving society in an uncertain future. Currently, diverse approaches to measuring the physical risks of climate change and to building resilience result in measurement and reporting inconsistencies, a lack of transparency, and missed opportunities for collaboration and collective impact across sectors.
The business community requires a new way of responding to climate shocks in order to cement its role as a driver of enhanced resilience and global stability – one that is comprehensive, inclusive, aligned, and sustainable over time.
By enabling transformations that substantially scale-up investment in climate resilience, our initiatives will lead to more resilient businesses, improve the adaptive capacity of the communities where businesses operate, and position businesses as advocates for policies that simultaneously strengthen private sector resilience while accelerating deep decarbonisation efforts.
This initiative stands as an important signal to businesses, investors, and policymakers that there exist companies deeply committed to advancing climate resilience.
Working Principles for Corporate Climate Resilience Leadership
- Science-based & Proactive: Companies acknowledge and assess the acute and chronic risks presented by the physical impacts of climate change and implement best practices and investments that enhance resilience across the value chain.
- Transparent & Accountable: Companies regularly measure and report assessed climate risks, adaptation actions, and their impacts in a consistent and transparent manner.
- Safeguarding & Enhancing: Companies employ practices that safeguard against maladaptation and increased vulnerability to physical climate hazards and strive to enhance the adaptive capacity of communities and natural ecosystems.
- Inclusive & Equitable: Companies strive to collaboratively engage value chains and local communities to understand and improve decision-making, contribute to systemic needs and priorities, and drive the implementation of equitable climate adaptation and resilience investments.
- Transformative: Companies support and pursue climate adaptation solutions that enable positive systems-level transformations within their organizations, industry sectors, and value chains, and in communities and natural ecosystems.
