Climate Change as a Business Opportunity

The gap between climate change impacts and potential solutions gets smaller every year. Today more than ever, climate change poses an opportunity for innovative thinkers to tackle the problem in sustainable and profitable ways.

In this video, Bettina Wittneben, Guest Expert on the Oxford Leading Sustainable Corporations Programme from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, discusses how corporate leaders can address the climate problem.

Transcript

I have to say when I first started working on climate change and business strategy, which is now 20 years ago, there was a real gap between the knowledge on climate-change impacts and mitigation options, in terms of the science and the technology, and the actions that companies were taking.

The reasons for that were mostly systemic: the systems in place encourage short-term thinking and they reward profitability in a very narrow sense. So there was no incentive for companies to pick up on what to do about the climate crisis.

Companies that were successful in doing this were not framed as a success in the business sense.

But now this gap is narrowing and we’re seeing that companies are now racing, in fact, to fill this gap. They’re the ones who are getting patents and who are coming up with innovative business policy options. But this means that the field is actually ripe with business opportunity for progressive thinkers. Companies are now in a position to reap the benefits of being proactive in climate-change management.

What we’ve observed is that once one board member or executive has understood the urgency of the climate crisis and the role of the business, and the opportunity the business has to address this climate crisis, then the change is rapid. Where it was slow at the beginning and painful to come, come up with that urgency and the role of the business. Then it’s like a domino effect, and the change is rapid and this whole system changes. And the whole company is able to address the climate crisis at all levels of its operations.