Companies are talking about the climate crisis but it’s just hot air

A new survey has found that only a small minority of firms have gotten as far as putting plans in place to mitigate the risks from such a seismic problem, writes James Moore

Only 8 per cent of businesses are prepared (Getty)

Talk is cheap and when it comes to the climate crisis the business community has been doing an awful lot of talking.

It’s an argument I’ve been making for a long time, and the response I usually get from business types is that, no, you’re wrong. We’re super serious about it and we’re engaging with the issue at board level.

Read the Corporate & Social Responsibility (CSR) section in our annual report (pretty please, the poor person works really hard on it and gets loads of grief from our psychopath head of comms so it’d be nice if someone acknowledged their effort).

Trouble is, according to some research out this morning, while they might be engaging with it, even in the midst of the pandemic, they weren’t doing much about it before the virus took hold and they’re not doing anything much about it now.

They’ll have a discussion about it, they’ll pat themselves on the back for being caring, sharing capitalists, they’ll tell the put upon CSR person to make notes for next year’s CSR report that nobody will read, and then they’ll press the button under the table to call for lunch.

KPMG, the accountancy and consulting firm, says it asked 160 UK “business leaders” across a range of industries whether climate change was a “top priority”.

Some 82 per cent said it was and that it was being actively discussed or on the agenda. Yay!

However, when asked if they had a “clear view of the risks ahead and how to tackle them”, only 8 per cent of businesses reported having a fully-fledged plan in place, compared to 89 per cent who were “in early stage discussions” whatever that means, and 3 per cent not at all.

All of which indicates that my thesis was correct, and the amount of hot air being expended in Britain’s boardrooms probably equates to the combined emissions of a fleet of those horrible American SUVs people in Kensington for some reason think are appropriate for navigating London’s streets.

There are some who would say that the fact that it’s being talked about at all is a good thing given the pandemic and the generational recession it has ushered in.

But that lets them off the hook far, far too easily.

The climate crisis is a much, much bigger issue than the coronavirus. It will have a much bigger impact on investment returns, on corporate profits, but far more importantly on the habitability of the planet on which we all live. It may also contribute to getting more nasty microbes into the human population en route to screwing everything up. It has started to be reflected in things like insurance premiums. But that’s only the beginning.

So no, businesses do not deserve any credit at all for continuing to talk about it in the middle of a pandemic because, as I said at the outset, talk is pathetically cheap.

I’ve been a constituent critic of the laziness and short-termism of institutional investors, and will continue to be so. But credit where credit is due. The very fact that it is even being talked about by corporates is in no small part thanks to their efforts.

It is an issue that they do seem to be taking seriously, and rather more seriously than the companies in which they invest. This is because they can see the future. They can see the hits their funds are going to take down the road (and not all that far) as a result of it.

They’d best prepare themselves to get involved in some more arm twisting if they want their investee companies to move it beyond the windy discussions that are currently taking place.

They may very well need to use their votes to send a message.