Climate change is not just a risk, it’s a security threat

Given that 71% of boards currently report increasing their scenario planning and strategic risk oversight in 2025, a logical step is for boards to embed climate-related security as a standing agenda item and conduct stress tests that uncover cascading risks to anticipate unforeseen consequences and strategic blind spots.

What should these boardroom conversations look like? They should be part of audit, part of operations, part of business as usual. The prevailing focus to date has been on regulation and disclosure – whether they are emissions inventories, standards or Scope 1, 2 and 3 – and these have diverted attention away from forward-looking strategic dialogue such as: “What happens if flooding or drought elsewhere results in mass migration?”, “What happens to critical infrastructure with climate shocks?” or “What happens if food or water scarcity destabilises regions critical to our businesses?”. These are security questions, not “just” sustainability ones.

A lack of scenario foresight leads to unpreparedness; unpreparedness erodes resilience; and eroded resilience exposes systemic vulnerabilities. As climate expert Professor Sir David King of Cambridge University notes, climate change often builds slowly but impacts can accelerate rapidly. It takes longer than you think, then happens faster than you could ever imagine. That makes advanced planning essential.

Boards should assess climate-related disruption as a risk class whose scale and systemic interconnection can be comparable to geopolitical conflict or a coordinated cyberattack.

All of this requires a coordinated effort from corporates and their boards, as well as governments and supra-national organisations (despite their funding challenges). This is what will deliver a more resilient and prepared business environment.

Break out of compliance into fresh practical thinking

In many organisations, risk management has collapsed into compliance, creating a false sense of control. Compliance is not resilience. Fresh thinking should focus on tangible returns on investment and practical measures to tackle real risk. We cannot rely solely on compliance mechanisms to secure the future. Boards must also move beyond individual action towards strategic, collective crisis management planning.

We have seen psychological experiments that demonstrate how collective avoidance of crises can lead to inaction. And like the famous psychology experiment whereby participants counting basketball passes fail to see a gorilla across the stage, our focus on audit and metrics can blind us to existential risks moving in plain sight. That is where we are now. This needs to change, and we need to address it in boardrooms; we cannot let collective avoidance of issues (that appear too hard to resolve as individual entities or that become obscured by short-term threats) result in doing too little collectively for the long term.

Despite the existential risk of climate change, the narrative must be constructive, thus broadening stakeholder support. Fear paralyses; agency mobilises. There is a huge role for communications to play in a more secure future – not just in terms of crisis management, but also in terms of describing plausible, everyday evidence-based scenarios to help bring about behaviour change and move people to act. Boards should champion climate security as an investment in stability.

New narratives for the boardroom

One way of reducing the complexity of the problem is for non-executive directors to ask: “What aren't we thinking about now?", “What are the risks that we haven't talked about in this board meeting?", "What would happen if, for example, we didn't have access to a vital resource in our supply chain because of flooding?”. Then boil the narrative down to what they can do rather than what they can’t.

Ask: “How can we turn this problem into something that is describable, something that people can understand?”. If you don’t describe something, you can’t manage it.

Positive returns on investment in resilience are demonstrable – through infrastructure, renewables, adaptation technologies. These sectors generate measurable value beyond financial returns: sustained employment across supply chains, productivity gains through greater reliability, and economic spill-overs that strengthen stability.

Collectively, these outcomes represent the “resilience dividend”. We can measure all these things and understand a business’s societal return on investment and therefore what it has contributed to security. This is how we should frame climate action, in a positive light with real-world examples to garner support and engagement.

By turning things on their head and instead of looking at insecurity, we should talk about how much independence, reliability and security we are building and report on that. This will instil confidence across society and fight the doom that is creating inertia.

Fear and scale have too often translated into inaction. It’s time to replace paralysis with purpose by embedding achievable climate security initiatives into the core of corporate strategy, measuring progress in preparedness, resilience and shared security. We proved this during the pandemic, and now is the moment to apply it to climate security, with intent and foresight.