Climate Action: Key Resources to Support Your Company’s Leadership

This blog was first published in 2021, and was updated in July 2024 for accuracy and relevance.

Corporate executives and directors play an important role in ensuring the companies they lead take credible climate action. It is crucial that they are well informed about climate change, climate risk, and the need for credible climate action, including credible transition plans. The climate crisis is already having far-reaching consequences for companies, economies, ecosystems, and society.

Unfortunately, not all leaders have sufficient climate literacy to meaningfully respond to these urgent risks and opportunities. In this blog, we highlight some helpful resources you can share with your executives and your board. In subsequent blogs, we will share additional resources related to supporting rapid decarbonisation and climate adaptation.

Helping your company’s leaders take meaningful climate action

Leading companies are investing in climate training for their leadership and boards so that they are well equipped to embed climate risks and opportunities into their strategic planning and decision-making. This includes understanding climate science and climate-related risks, emerging expectations in climate-related disclosures, how to set credible climate goals and articulate climate position statements, and how to participate in climate-aligned financing.

If you want to support your company’s leadership and board in meaningfully integrating climate considerations into your operations and decision-making, here are some helpful resources to share with them.

1. Cover the basics

It is crucial that your company’s leadership and board understand the significance of climate change and the specific physical and transition risks it poses for your business. This Guide for Corporate Leaders and Directors can help them to understand the science behind climate change, why climate change matters to your company, and what actions your company can take to accelerate the transition to a net-zero, climate-resilient future. This 4-part video series can also help corporate directors and leaders understand the risks of climate change and their role and fiduciary responsibilities to oversee these risks. It is also increasing important that executives and directors understand the importance of addressing Scope 3 emissions in their value chain.

2. Analyse climate scenarios to evaluate risks and opportunities

Your leaders need to understand how your company may be affected by climate change. While the IFRS Foundation has taken over the monitoring duties of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the materials developed by the Taskforce remain a comprehensive source of relevant information.

The TCFD recommendations report and technical supplement provide in-depth information and tools for using scenario analyses to understand the implications of climate-related risks and opportunities to your organisation, including by developing hypothetical scenarios to highlight the central elements of a possible future and to foster critical strategic thinking around climate change.

3. Develop meaningful climate targets and transition plans

When your company is preparing to set meaningful climate targets, benchmarking research can help executives in your organisation to understand what leaders in your peer group and across the globe are committing to. The Embedding Project’s Goals Database and step-by-step article on setting credible sustainability goals are helpful resources for learning best practices and for supporting the development of credible goals. This report from the UN sets out key principles and recommendations for developing and implementing credible and comprehensive net-zero commitments, and the Science Based Targets initiative has also developed an array of resources that can help your executives to understand how to develop emissions reduction goals that align with the latest climate science. To help your leaders learn more about developing transition plans, this report from Ceres highlights specific goal- and target-setting actions that your business can take to create a leading climate transition action plan.

4. Establish effective oversight of climate performance

The most significant climate impacts on your organisation may not materialize until the medium or long term. To ensure your company’s climate strategy does not get undermined by other, more pressing priorities, it is crucial to equip your company’s board and leadership with the tools for effective oversight. This World Economic Forum and PwC paper proposes tools that support boards to navigate climate risks and opportunities, with principles designed to increase directors’ climate awareness, embed climate issues into board structures and processes, and improve identification and navigation of climate-related risks and opportunities for business. CPA Canada’s Climate Change Briefing contains 20 questions directors can ask management about how they are adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change, and this report by INSEAD explains how boards can be structured to better support sustainability-related efforts. This report co-produced by the Embedding Project and CPA Canada provides guidance for boards of directors on how to prepare for the rising expectations related to scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) and how to engage in effective oversight in their value chain.

5. Deliver on your climate goals

What does it take to actually deliver on the climate strategy your company has set? The Climate Action Pathways set out sectoral visions for achieving a 1.5° C resilient world by 2050 and highlight overarching transformational milestones and the key impacts that must be achieved to realize them. This McKinsey article also covers what they found helped companies across the globe and in various industries succeed with their carbon reduction initiatives. They found that even the exercise of setting goals is an important step for companies in the overall journey, and that aggressive targets may actually help spur strong emissions reduction performance!

In the next blog in this series, we identify key resources for accelerating your climate mitigation efforts. You can also explore our website for these and other resources on the issue of climate change, developing embedded sustainability strategies and corporate position statements, and other free, practical tools and guides for corporate sustainability change agents.