A new report from international sustainability non-profit Forum for the Future highlights four possible future trajectories and calls for five shifts in how businesses operate if they are to manage the systemic risks associated with an increasingly disrupted climate.
The report calls on leaders to shift their business:
- From a risk prevention mindset to a transformative one, which involves seeing opportunity, not risk, in change, while investing in both climate adaptation and mitigation measures.
- From addressing the symptoms of our social and environmental crises to tackling their root causes. This necessitates moving beyond incremental ‘solutions’ (that are likely to fail) to recognise underlying causes of challenges and the potential unintended consequences of your interventions.
- From passively responding to their operating context to actively shaping it. From influencing policy to better engaging stakeholders and customers, businesses must increase their agency to drive change.
- From slow centralised decision-making to more agile distributed governance models. Instead of consolidating power, businesses must distribute responsibilities and value creation across multiple levels and stakeholder groups.
- From failing to acknowledge the influence of individual, organisational and contextual bias to identifying and removing this bias in risk assessment. Businesses making this shift will see more equitable and balanced decision-making longer-term.