The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how vulnerable companies are to systemic risk events — and how limited our normal business risk management approaches are in these situations. In January 2019, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Harvard Global Health Institute published a white paper about how businesses should prepare for a pandemic. It recommended steps […]
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual Global Risk Reports get a lot of attention from the business community. In recent years, the prominence of climate change related risks has suggested to many observers that the business community is getting more serious about tackling climate change.The COVID-19 crisis, however, gives us an interesting look into how […]
In 2019 Duncan Austin coined the term “greenwishing” to describe environmental and sustainability initiatives with little likelihood of material impact. Does #pandemicwishing now need to join the business risk management vocabulary as well?The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed the conventional risk management strategies that companies may have had in place to deal with such an event. That’s because COVID-19 […]
Last week, I posted on LinkedIn a piece from Greenbiz.com dealing with forestry and carbon offsets, with comments of my own. I was stunned to see my short comment get more than 8,000 views in just a few days. If nothing else, it confirms today’s heightened interest in and skepticism of carbon offsets. It reminds me […]
Global calls for better corporate “climate risk disclosure” have exploded over the last 12-24 months. The underlying hypothesis of much of the risk disclosure conversation is that if companies disclose climate risks to shareholders, financial markets will price those risks into share prices, stock markets will become more efficient, and financial stability will be safeguarded. […]