Climate resilience is about building socio-ecological systems as well as organizations that can best withstand the coming stresses of climate change and mitigate the severity of future impacts; it is about setting companies and societies on the path of sustainable development. Standards, we argue, could help give direction and dimension to this complex undertaking.
- Business needs to develop a more fluid and integrated perspective on mitigation, adaptation, and sustainability to ensure identification of trade-offs and co-benefits.
- To identify opportunities, climate action taken by business must focus on more than physical climate risks, and should also involve organizational, strategic, and business model transformation.
- Standards can be powerful tools for integrating climate risks and opportunities into core business strategies and for supporting the transformations needed for climate-resilient pathways.
- To be transformative, standards must influence not only the operations of companies, but also affect their external environment, and even contribute to changes in world views and paradigms.
- Business climate action requires solutions-oriented research that bridges the gap between the climate change science community and business.
- Going forward, an ideal point of departure is the further development of procedural guidance to support companies with integrating climate risks and opportunities into core business.