Among a myriad of global challenges facing society, climate change is one of the most pressing. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 10 warmest years since 1850 have occurred in the past decade—and 2024 is on track to reach the top five.
“Societies around the world are experiencing the costly—and even devastating—effects of these changes,” says Harvard Business School Professor Forest Reinhardt, who co-teaches the online course Business and Climate Change with HBS Professor Mike Toffel. “From more frequent wildfires and hurricanes to more intense heat waves and flooding to rising sea levels and changes in the ocean, these effects are projected to intensify and become more unpredictable in the decades ahead.”
One of the sectors most impacted by and accountable for climate change is business.
Free E-Book: How to Be a Purpose-Driven, Global Business Professional
Access your free e-book today.
DOWNLOAD NOWBusiness’s Role in Climate Change
Firms worldwide are experiencing climate change’s effects through challenges such as cross-border pollution and rising insurance costs. Yet, they’ve also contributed to it by generating excess greenhouse gas emissions by:
- Burning fossil fuels
- Manufacturing cement, steel, and iron
- Producing and managing waste
- Transporting goods
- Clearing land
- Raising livestock
- Using refrigeration and air conditioning
That’s prompted many business leaders to consider how their organizations can be more socially responsible and enact positive change.
“Companies in every industry are changing the ways they do business,” Reinhardt says in Business and Climate Change. “They’re modifying their operations, supply chains, products, and investment strategies to adapt to these changes while working to reduce the emissions that contribute to global climate change.”
Over 8,000 companies have committed to net-zero initiatives and 96 percent of the world’s top 250 report on sustainability.
If you want to follow that trend and help your organization prepare for climate change’s risks and opportunities, here are three real-world examples to inspire your approach.
3 Companies Tackling Climate Change
1. Patagonia
Outdoor apparel manufacturer Patagonia has long been known for its environmental stewardship.
Since 1985, the company has pledged one percent of its sales to preserving and restoring the natural environment and, since 2002, has been part of a global network of firms committed to inspiring collective action and preventing greenwashing—when companies claim they have sustainable business practices but don’t.
More recently, Patagonia made headlines when its founder, Yvon Chouinard, announced he was transferring company ownership to help combat climate change. Rather than sell Patagonia or take it public, Chouinard declared Earth as its “only shareholder,” stating all its profits would go to a specially created trust and nonprofit dedicated to addressing the environmental crisis.
“Instead of ‘going public,’ you could say we’re ‘going purpose,’” Chouinard wrote in a statement. “Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.”
In addition to its financial efforts, Patagonia strives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by using recycled materials and decreasing its reliance on carbon-intensive fuels. It also supports grassroots organizations on the frontline of the fight against climate change.
No matter your industry, Patagonia serves as a prime example of how focusing on your organization’s triple bottom line—its environmental and social impact as well as its financial performance—can drive social change and business success.
Learn more about the triple bottom line in the video below, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for additional explainer content.
2. New Belgium Brewing Company
One real-world example featured in Business in Climate Change centers on New Belgium Brewing, a craft beer maker that achieved a major milestone in 2020: making its flagship offering, Fat Tire Ale, the first certified carbon-neutral U.S. beer.
According to the course, carbon neutrality indicates a balance between carbon emissions and removal or sequestration—resulting in no increase in carbon emissions.
“Certified carbon neutral is a certification administered, in our case, by SCS Global, that proves we’re not only working to reduce emissions within our business—and for the Fat Tire brand specifically—but also then engaging to neutralize the emissions that do remain through extremely high-quality programs around regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, and other types of projects that don't just offset but actually have an outsized positive impact on the climate crisis,” says the company’s former Senior Director of Communications and Public Engagement Adam Fetcher on an episode of the Climate Rising podcast, which Toffel hosts.
In Business and Climate Change, New Belgium’s Chief Environmental, Social, and Governance Officer Katie Wallace discusses how the brand’s carbon-neutral pursuit aligned with what its target audience cared about.
“We’ve always had a pretty loyal following around our environmental stewardship and that ethos,” Wallace says. “It wasn't until maybe the late 2010s that we started to get quite a bit of interest and aptitude from consumers as the climate impact started really showing up in a noticeable way through excess hurricanes and wildfires. Then we also just naturally heard people referring to climate change a little bit more.”
New Belgium’s climate change mitigation efforts included:
- Capturing biogas—a renewable energy source produced from the decomposition of organic matter like animal waste and food scraps—from its water treatment plant to generate electricity
- Installing solar panels on brewery buildings
- Advocating for renewable energy
- Switching from bottles to cans to produce a lower carbon footprint
Achieving carbon-neutral status increased Fat Tire sales, which Fetcher attributes to the brand’s sustainability work.
“It shows that beer companies can play a direct and meaningful role in drawing down their carbon emissions and investing in high-quality decarbonization projects that represent a future where climate change is less of a threat,” Fetcher says in Business and Climate Change. “It's also exciting because it gives us tools to engage our customers in a conversation around climate change—the ways and things in our lives that it directly threatens, including beer, and what they can do to play a role in helping to solve it.”
Those tools include suggestions for living more sustainably and supporting climate action on its website. The company also brewed a Torched Earth Ale to show what beer would be like in a climate-ravaged future and rebranded Fat Tire with a new tagline—“high quality, low impact”—to attract more climate-conscious customers.
New Belgium demonstrates not only how purpose can impact business performance but help engage and retain customers.
3. Google
Technology giant Google’s innovation doesn’t stop with its hallmark search engine and cloud-computing solutions. It’s now on a mission to tackle climate change using artificial intelligence (AI).
Google’s AI-driven actions have included:
- Implementing fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps
- Building a Flood Hub platform that provides real-time information to prepare for and respond to riverine floods
- Developing contrail forecast maps that enable pilots to choose routes that avoid creating them
On a Climate Rising episode, Head of Google Research Yossi Matias describes that the company prioritizes impact over profit when measuring such efforts.
“The beautiful thing about when we think about the efforts that we're doing at Google is that when we're trying to solve a problem, then the problem doesn't need to tie back to financial consideration,” Matias says. “Once we make a decision that it's part of our mission to help people in the context of the climate crisis, then the metrics by which we measure impact is how much progress we're doing on that. For example, in climate mitigation, the ultimate metric is: ‘How much carbon can we actually save?’ And that's actually the only guiding principle here.”
To that end, the company openly tracks progress toward its goals, which include achieving net-zero emissions across all its operations and value chain by 2030, replenishing 120 percent of the water it consumes, and maximizing finite resources’ reuse by transitioning to a circular economy.
Through all its initiatives, Google shows that technology can be a powerful means of inspiring change.
Real-World Learning Through a Climate Change Course
Although adapting to and mitigating climate change can seem monumental, these companies exemplify the business case for taking action.
“Climate change is one of the world’s biggest societal challenges,” Reinhardt says in Business and Climate Change. “Companies will have to play an active role if we, as a society, are to have any realistic hope of managing the challenges presented by climate change.”
Whether you work at a purpose-driven firm or want to help your organization be more sustainable, one of the best ways to develop your knowledge and creative problem-solving skills is by taking an online course, such as Business and Climate Change. Through interactive learning exercises and real-world examples featuring industry experts, you can gain insights to bolster your organization’s climate change strategy.
Do you want to prepare yourself and your organization for climate change’s effects? Explore Business and Climate Change—one of our online business in society courses—and download our free e-book on becoming a purpose-driven, global business professional.
