Sustainability & Society
- Decarbonization and climate adaptation are complementary, not competing priorities.
- Climate risks can also affect companies indirectly through suppliers and operations.
- Resilience requires climate risk to be integrated into investment and strategic decisions.
- Adaptation can protect progress made through decarbonization.
- Climate adaptation solutions also represent a growing market opportunity.
Should companies prioritize cutting greenhouse gas emissions or adapting to the physical effects of climate change? The answer developed in this Video is that businesses increasingly need to do both.
Decarbonization reduces the scale of the climate problem, while adaptation helps anticipate and limit its consequences. Bringing the two together can make businesses more resilient to extreme weather, supply-chain disruption and other climate-related risks.
Drawing on the 2024 Valencia floods and their consequences for businesses and suppliers, the video shows how climate impacts can cascade across a value chain, even when a company’s own facilities escape direct damage.
For business leaders, this means looking beyond emissions targets alone. Climate risk and adaptation solutions can also become part of investment planning, procurement, supply-chain management and product innovation. The goal is resilience by design: preparing businesses not only to reduce their climate impact, but also to operate in a changing climate.
To go further, explore how France is preparing for a +4°C climate scenario and discover Fernando J. Díaz López’s research on how businesses can strengthen their capabilities for climate adaptation.
