Climate in Every Boardroom

Climate, Sustainability & Leadership

In that battle between hope and despair, we all have the same choice to make – to step up and leave a legacy, or to ignore the call of history. There is power in knowing that we have a choice about how we respond to the distressing realities we now face.

Human activity has profoundly destabilised the Earth’s climate. Since the 1950s, the Earth entered the most pronounced period of accelerated change. The combination of emission of pollutants through the burning of fossil fuels and the loss of vast tracts of forests has resulted in the energy imbalance we are witnessing today.

Currently, Boards and senior leaders must address new governance structures resulting from imminent ESG regulatory changes. In addition, they must develop strategic and action planning to address the numerous risks ahead e.g., harm to assets/projects, supply chain disruptions and litigation risks, among others. In “disaster resilience” language, these are known as preventive, anticipative and absorptive capacities. And whilst they are essential, focusing exclusively on them creates pessimism and even despair and paralysis.

In today’s complex world, leaders influence others to achieve common goals by behaving with emotional intelligence and considering all stakeholders in the process. When climate, indeed the planet, is one of those stakeholders, leadership conversations will change considerably.

Climate and the planet - Resources for leaders and teams

There is a plethora of misinformation published by social media, and mainstream media outlets causing a great deal of confusion, climate science and denialism. Even worse, some ill-informed researchers have been publishing that it is too late for humanity to do anything constructive to stabilise the Earth’s climate. This is known as “doomism” and it’s easy to see why many journalists and even researchers are making pessimistic “guesstimates”, especially when they look at the well-known Climate Action Tracker (CAT) Thermometer image (which is scientifically correct) without additional scientific and systemic context:

Source: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-thermometer/

It’s not too late to act but we must educate ourselves if we are to be effective in our actions. We’ve therefore created this page with some of the world’s leading climate scientists and communicators.

Continue reading: Learn about the basics.