Climate Resilience as Strategy Scaling Corporate Action on Physical Risks from Climate Change

Summary

Physical climate risk has become a multiplier of every other disruption companies face—shaping earnings, insurability, financing costs, and competitive positioning. Yet drawing on interviews and dialogues with over 40 organizations, we found that most companies been unable to translate their recognition of the risks into readiness. While 65 percent of public companies now cite physical climate risk in their filings, only 25 percent of those acting have taken genuinely strategic measures to build climate resilience. Conversely, many companies continue to respond to event by event. The barrier is not information but the absence of shared financial language, clear ownership, and connected guidance. In this report, we call for a coordinated, practitioner-led effort to build that foundation—a navigable catalog of guidance, a maturity model, a standardized corporate climate resilience framework, and sector-specific playbooks—and we invite companies, investors, standard-setters, and expert organizations to build it with us.

Highlights

Physical climate risk is no longer a tail risk—it is a threat multiplier that makes every disruption that companies experience harder to absorb. For instance, drought deepens supply shortages already constrained by tariffs, and wildfires or flooding compound existing economic uncertainty. Without adapting to the physical impacts from climate change, major companies globally face projected annual losses of $1.2 trillion by the 2050s.

Most companies recognize the risks but lack the organizational infrastructure to act on them at scale. Only 42 percent of companies in S&P Global’s 2025 Corporate Sustainability Assessment have adaptation plans, and responsibility is fragmented across sustainability, finance, and operations leaders who rarely share a common language or reporting line.

Translating climate risk into financial terms is critical to scaling corporate action. Companies that have quantified climate exposure as operational downtime, revenue loss, and value at risk, rather than describing climate risk more generally as high, medium, or low, are better able to mobilize investment. And among those that have invested in operational resilience, 82 percent report positive financial or reputational results, including stronger internal buy-in, better insurance terms, and improved access to capital.

We need a coordinated knowledge base and the shared infrastructure to move companies across industry sectors from awareness to scaled action, starting with a navigable catalog of guidance, frameworks, and tools; a corporate climate resilience maturity model; a broadly accepted standardized corporate climate resilience framework; and sector-specific playbooks. The building blocks exist—what is missing is the architecture to connect them. We are calling on companies, investors, and standard-setters to build that foundation together.