Businesses are starting to recognise the difficult realities of climate change and nature loss

Last year, I gave a talk at a couple of large sustainability conferences in London - titled 'Why Nobody Wants to Pay to Save Nature' - in which I argued that climate accountability for businesses was weak because nature loss and climate change impacts weren't clearly appearing as financial costs on their balance sheets.

Whilst it's one thing to convince leaders that their business – like every other – depends on healthy ecosystems, it's another to actually change corporate behaviour. That's because corporate decision-making is driven by profitability: reducing costs, increasing revenue, or both. Since many organisations struggled to describe in financial terms how climate change and nature degradation were affecting them, the business case was hard to make, and corporate climate and nature action stalled.

The findings of our Climate Commitments Report 2026 – launched this week by Ecologi and BusinessGreen – show that this is starting to change.

Businesses are starting to recognise costly climate impacts

Our research shows that 84 per cent of UK businesses have experienced at least one direct climate-related impact in the past two years. These impacts include supply chain disruption, rising insurance premiums, damages from extreme weather events, energy price volatility, and employee health and productivity challenges (e.g. air pollution or extreme heat). Only a small minority of firms (13 per cent) report being unaffected.

Importantly, companies are actually able to identify concrete financial consequences. Of the impacted businesses (n = 1,385), 70 per cent report that climate-related impacts have affected at least one per cent of annual turnover in the past year, with 40 per cent reporting impacts of six per cent or more.

In an environment of rising costs and margins often measured in single digits, impacts of this scale appearing on the balance sheet are remarkable. In some cases, they are sufficient to determine whether a business makes a profit or a loss in a given year.

Nature remains a blind spot for many businesses

Despite growing awareness of climate risk, a significant gap remains in how businesses understand their dependence on nature.

Only 58 per cent of organisations explicitly recognise that their operations depend on biodiversity – a figure that has declined nine percentage points since last year's survey. This is concerning because all businesses ultimately depend on nature, either directly or through supply chains. Recent reports from IPBES and from ISEP and the Aldersgate Group have demonstrated just how deep this reliance runs, even if it is not consistently recognised by the businesses we surveyed.

This creates a blind spot: businesses have learned how to respond to symptoms without necessarily understanding root causes and systemic dependencies.

That said, one encouraging finding was that 75 per cent of businesses agree that investing in nature within their company's operational geography is an investment in their resilience. This suggests that, while the dependency is not always explicitly recognised, nature is increasingly seen as part of the solution to safeguarding continuity.

Risk and resilience framing is vital to gaining traction

This ‘risk framing' is central to understanding where momentum is building. 61 per cent of businesses have now adopted formal approaches to climate resilience planning. This reflects how climate action gains traction when it is linked to business continuity and profitability. At the same time, 83 per cent of businesses believe that making progress on net zero is essential to protecting future revenue.

This shift is crucial. Net zero is increasingly seen not only as an environmental target but as a vital mechanism for protecting future cash flows, stabilising operating conditions, and maintaining competitiveness in volatile markets.

This is the transition that we needed to see. When businesses can say with confidence that 'our business will be more profitable if we take climate action seriously', meaningful progress becomes far more likely.

The bottom line: climate and nature are becoming more visible for businesses, and this is the key to driving corporate climate action

As I argued in 2025, businesses do not respond to abstract environmental narratives. They respond to measurable financial exposure. The challenge has therefore been how to internalise the externalities of climate breakdown and nature loss in ways that are visible to decision-makers.

Our findings in the Climate Commitments Report suggest that this visibility is emerging. The next step is ensuring businesses move from identifying financial impacts to embedding climate and nature dependencies into how they design, finance, and operate their organisations from top to bottom.

Sam Jackson is Director of Climate Science and Impact at Ecologi.

Ecologi is the UK's most trusted climate action platform for every step of your climate journey. Speak with one of their climate experts today at ecologi.com