Beware of Still Waters: Why Businesses Need to Rethink Climate Adaptation
Written by Joanna CONNELL
The latest report from ESCP and the Climate School explores the growing gap between corporate confidence and the reality of climate risk.
The summer of 2026 exposed the growing financial and operational risks of a changing climate. Extreme heat, water scarcity and wildfires disrupted business activities across the continent, forcing organisations to implement adaptation measures at short notice… Factories have adjusted working hours, construction sites have paused operations, and local infrastructure has come under increasing strain.
Against this backdrop, ESCP and Apave Climate School have published Beware of Still Waters, a report on Business Adaptation to Climate Change.
Drawing on a year-long action research programme involving major multinational companies, interviews with executives and climate experts, academic research and corporate disclosures, the report asks a simple but important question:
Are businesses genuinely becoming more resilient, or are they merely becoming better at talking about resilience?
A reassuring picture… on the surface
If you look at corporate reporting, it would be easy to conclude that climate adaptation is progressing well.
After all, climate governance has become increasingly sophisticated over the past decade. Companies now have regulatory climate risk frameworks, dedicated reporting processes, sustainability targets and governance structures.
But our research suggests that this apparent progress may not tell the full story. Instead, climate adaptation often remains more visible in reports than in strategic decision-making. Many organisations focus heavily on processes and assessments while struggling to translate insights into concrete action.
The result is a paradox: companies appear increasingly confident about their climate resilience, while climate risks continue to accumulate in the background. Or, as former IPCC Vice-Chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte puts it, we are currently “trotting slowly behind a climate that is changing at a gallop.”
Why climate risk is different
One of the report’s central findings is that climate risks do not behave like many of the risks businesses are accustomed to managing.
To help explain this, the report introduces the PUSH framework, which identifies four characteristics that make climate risks uniquely challenging:
P – Predetermined
A significant proportion of future warming is already locked in due to decades of past greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation is therefore unavoidable. Some level of climate change must now be managed.
U – Unprecedented
There is no historical playbook for many of the conditions organisations will face in the coming decades. Past experience cannot always guide future decisions.
S – Systemic
Climate impacts do not remain isolated. They spread through supply chains, infrastructure networks, financial systems and local economies, creating knock-on effects that are difficult to predict.
H – Heterogeneous
Risks vary considerably depending on geography, sector and business model. What works for one organisation may be ineffective for another.
Taken together, these characteristics make climate risk fundamentally different from traditional business risks and much harder to manage through conventional approaches alone.
Why more data won’t solve everything
Many organisations continue to search for ever more precise climate data before making important decisions. However, the pursuit of increasingly precise numbers can create an illusion of certainty while overlooking critical vulnerabilities.
Data and modelling remain essential tools, but climate risk is shaped by structural uncertainty that even the most sophisticated models cannot fully resolve.
This means adaptation cannot be based solely on prediction. Instead, organisations need to develop the ability to make robust decisions under uncertain future conditions, while recognising that not every risk can be quantified precisely.
Moving from reassurance to reliability
So what should organisations do?
The report concludes with five recommendations for organisations looking to strengthen their resilience:
- Build climate risk literacy at board and executive level
- Develop decision-making approaches that work under uncertainty
- Shift attention from exposure to vulnerability
- Use disruptive climate scenarios to stress-test resilience
- Strengthen collaboration across organisations, sectors and communities
Ultimately, the organisations most likely to succeed will be those that learn how to operate, adapt and make decisions in a world where uncertainty is becoming the norm.
Read the full report
Beware of Still Waters draws on interviews, corporate case studies, academic research and practical insights gathered through the Programme Adaptation(s), a partnership between the ESCP Sustainability Institute, Apave Climate School and several French multinationals.
Whether you are a business leader, risk manager or a sustainability professional, this report provides practical insights into one of the defining strategic challenges of the coming decades.
Download the full report to explore the findings and recommendations in detail.
