For those interested in climate change mitigation and the role of business in this, there are two recent critical publications to review.

The 2024 State of the Climate Report is devastating. Despite 30yrs of COP’s, ESG,  decarbonization and corporate commitments to sustainability, graph after graph depicts the confirmation of an unfolding and irreversible climate disaster. Fossil fuel emissions at an all time high, CO2 parts per million approaching 425, ocean heat content at an all time high, glacier thickness change accelerating & global tree loss cover increasing to 28MHa per year. Each one of these statistics speaks to both a developing anthropocentric crisis and a current ecological and biospheric one. This  is indeed a polycrisis.  A polycrisis demands a systemic response and the Sustainable Development Goals report (2024) provides  the framework to measure progress  in this area. Again the results are confronting with stagnation and even regression apparent in critical goals including SDG 13 ( Climate) although some encouraging developments in SDG7  (Affordable & Clean Energy) and 12 (Responsible Production & Consumption). So what’s to be done? It’s clear that terrorising people with threats of extinction and societal collapse are ineffective in orchestrating significant behavioural change – terror management theory tells us that.  For business I think there are useful metrics that provide  essential guidance to greening  strategy, specifically the concept of weak versus strong sustainability, ( Roome, 2018, Landrum, 2024) which at its core changes the frame from business as usual mitigating environmental impacts where possible to  business and economics embedded  in and dependent on environmental systems.  Facilitating that transition I think is the challenge of climate change leadership in organisations.