Final 12 months, I gave a chat at a few massive sustainability conferences in London – titled ‘Why No one Needs to Pay to Save Nature’ – during which I argued that local weather accountability for companies was weak as a result of nature loss and local weather change impacts weren’t clearly showing as monetary prices on their steadiness sheets.
While it is one factor to persuade leaders that their enterprise – like each different – is determined by wholesome ecosystems, it is one other to truly change company behaviour. That is as a result of company decision-making is pushed by profitability: lowering prices, rising income, or each. Since many organisations struggled to explain in monetary phrases how local weather change and nature degradation have been affecting them, the enterprise case was laborious to make, and company local weather and nature motion stalled.
The findings of our Local weather Commitments Report 2026 – launched this week by Ecologi and BusinessGreen – present that that is beginning to change.
Companies are beginning to recognise expensive local weather impacts
Our analysis exhibits that 84 per cent of UK companies have skilled a minimum of one direct climate-related influence prior to now two years. These impacts embrace provide chain disruption, rising insurance coverage premiums, damages from excessive climate occasions, vitality value volatility, and worker well being and productiveness challenges (e.g. air air pollution or excessive warmth). Solely a small minority of companies (13 per cent) report being unaffected.
Importantly, corporations are literally in a position to establish concrete monetary penalties. Of the impacted companies (n = 1,385), 70 per cent report that climate-related impacts have affected a minimum of one per cent of annual turnover prior to now 12 months, with 40 per cent reporting impacts of six per cent or extra.
In an setting of rising prices and margins usually measured in single digits, impacts of this scale showing on the steadiness sheet are exceptional. In some instances, they’re enough to find out whether or not a enterprise makes a revenue or a loss in a given 12 months.
Nature stays a blind spot for a lot of companies
Regardless of rising consciousness of local weather threat, a big hole stays in how companies perceive their dependence on nature.
Solely 58 per cent of organisations explicitly recognise that their operations rely on biodiversity – a determine that has declined 9 proportion factors since final 12 months’s survey. That is regarding as a result of all companies in the end rely on nature, both straight or by means of provide chains. Latest reviews from IPBES and from ISEP and the Aldersgate Group have demonstrated simply how deep this reliance runs, even when it isn’t persistently recognised by the companies we surveyed.
This creates a blind spot: companies have realized how to answer signs with out essentially understanding root causes and systemic dependencies.
That stated, one encouraging discovering was that 75 per cent of companies agree that investing in nature inside their firm’s operational geography is an funding of their resilience. This implies that, whereas the dependency just isn’t at all times explicitly recognised, nature is more and more seen as a part of the answer to safeguarding continuity.
Danger and resilience framing is important to gaining traction
This ‘threat framing’ is central to understanding the place momentum is constructing. 61 per cent of companies have now adopted formal approaches to local weather resilience planning. This displays how local weather motion good points traction when it’s linked to enterprise continuity and profitability. On the similar time, 83 per cent of companies imagine that making progress on web zero is crucial to defending future income.
This shift is essential. Internet zero is more and more seen not solely as an environmental goal however as an important mechanism for shielding future money flows, stabilising working situations, and sustaining competitiveness in unstable markets.
That is the transition that we would have liked to see. When companies can say with confidence that ‘our enterprise will probably be extra worthwhile if we take local weather motion significantly’, significant progress turns into way more possible.
The underside line: local weather and nature have gotten extra seen for companies, and that is the important thing to driving company local weather motion
As I argued in 2025, companies don’t reply to summary environmental narratives. They reply to measurable monetary publicity. The problem has subsequently been tips on how to internalise the externalities of local weather breakdown and nature loss in methods which might be seen to decision-makers.
Our findings within the Local weather Commitments Report recommend that this visibility is rising. The following step is guaranteeing companies transfer from figuring out monetary impacts to embedding local weather and nature dependencies into how they design, finance, and function their organisations from high to backside.
Sam Jackson is Director of Local weather Science and Impression at Ecologi.
Ecologi is the UK’s most trusted local weather motion platform for each step of your local weather journey. Converse with one in every of their local weather consultants right this moment at ecologi.com
