16 October, 2026

Who owns climate risk in your business? If the answer is “the sustainability team”, that may be part of the problem.

That was the starting point for our latest Sustainability Leaders Panel (SLP) roundtable. The SLP is our community of over 150 sustainability professionals, and we brought together a selection of them, including Nestlé Waters, Quorn Foods, ScottishPower and Pladis Global, to talk honestly about climate risk. The timing matters. This summer’s extreme heat showed that impacts are being felt everywhere, and a new wave of climate risk regulation, including IFRS S2, is raising the bar on how businesses quantify and manage climate risk. In a tough operating environment, companies need to be commercially minded about where the risks and opportunities sit.

So, what did we hear?

Sustainability teams can identify climate risks, but the decisions needed to manage them often sit elsewhere, so ownership has to extend across the business. Local champions, factory forums and peer learning are driving real action, though sustaining momentum usually needs formal support and resource. ERM alignment can raise visibility, but practical action on the ground may matter more than a line in the risk register.

Climate risk gains traction when it’s tied to existing priorities like cost reduction, resilience, energy security and market access. Carbon management offers lessons too: simple models and decision-support tools helped embed carbon into decisions, and similar approaches could help prioritise climate risk responses. Analysis should stay proportionate. It should inform decisions, not become the objective.

Our key takeaway? Climate risk gets managed when it’s treated as a business decision, not a sustainability exercise.

Thank you to everyone who joined us. Interested in joining future SLP conversations? Or already part of the SLP and have a pressing issue you’d like to explore with peers? We’d love to hear from you.

By Budd Nicholson