Understanding Private Sector Risk to Climate Change and Designing Guidance for Engagement

Abstract

Climate change poses immediate and new challenges to global supply chains and sustainability. World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the world’s leading conservation organization, currently cultivates corporate partnerships to advance its conservation mission and is seeking new strategies for engagement to help the private sector build climate resilient supply chains that will ultimately strengthen the resilience of the landscapes, ecosystems, and communities that those companies rely on. To do so, they need to first understand the current state of corporate action and thinking on resilience to climate change. This project seeks to map the landscape of climate change resilience thinking for private sector actors and produce materials WWF can use to assist partner companies to address climate change in supply chains. In this report, we identify how company operations are at risk due to climate change, the motivations and barriers to taking action, and the strategies employed by companies to prepare for climate change impacts. To identify what climate resilience means to the private sector, we conducted interviews with select WWF partners with global operations and agricultural sourcing in vulnerable areas and analyzed their responses for perceptions of climate change risk. We found that the main barriers to climate change resilience thinking include: a lack of information, insufficient capacity, and organizational deficits related to minimal communication between sustainability and supply chain managers. Thus, we recommend that WWF pursues the following for corporate engagement: (1) present a clear definition of resilience and adaptation versus mitigation, (2) compel collaboration between sustainability teams and those that are directly involved in supply chain decisions, and (3) make the business case for climate resilience, as well as provide useful information about long term actions.