No business on a dead planet: How to equip leaders to integrate climate, nature, and people into business strategies?

What is at stake regarding climate change and nature loss is business resilience (their ability to adapt and thrive through inevitable changes), economic stability (on which societal foundations such as social stability and peace depend), and long-term prosperity (on which our livelihoods depend). 

Companies face increasing regulatory pressures, shifting consumer expectations, and financial risks related to climate change and nature loss. For quite some time, leaders have been integrating sustainability into their strategies, primarily focusing on ensuring their businesses remain financially healthy and sustainable over time. However, as climate change and nature degradation trends continue to cascade, the paradigm is shifting – organisations must now account for the broader impact of their operations on climate, society and ecosystems, beyond economic performance. Future business leaders need the skills to turn these challenges into opportunities—ensuring that climate and nature-positive leadership is not just a risk mitigation strategy but also a strategy for innovation, competitiveness, and value creation.

Business schools shape the leaders who will set corporate strategies, design financial instruments, and influence policy. Climate-neutral, nature-positive, and fair leadership is not just about science or policy—it’s about deep business transformation.

We can influence how science, policy, and business strategy are integrated, translating complex challenges into actionable business decisions. BS4CL’s faculty conduct research on emerging climate strategies, our programmes equip students with the latest tools and frameworks – such as Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB),  etc. – and our executive education shapes how today’s leaders drive change within their organisations. Without business schools playing an active role, the private sector risks a significant leadership crisis, leading to fragmented, short-term, and insufficient responses to the climate crisis.

There is increasing demand from business school students of all levels to acquire climate leadership knowledge, skills, and tools. Students and businesses now recognise climate and nature action as a core business issue, but they also face uncertainty, misinformation, and ideological divides. Climate, nature, and societal commitments are increasingly scrutinised, and leaders must navigate regulatory complexity, greenwashing and social-washing risks, and economic trade-offs.

As business schools, our role is to cut through confusion with science-based insights and ensure that decision-making is rooted in evidence-based data. Through rigorous research and thought leadership, we equip leaders to address climate and nature challenges with confidence and strategic clarity. In times of polarisation and misinformation, collaborative approaches – such as BS4CL’s unified, evidence-based approach – strengthen future leaders’ capacity to drive real, science-backed climate and nature action.

Despite recent progress in a growing number of schools and universities, several challenges remain:

• Integrating climate and nature across all business disciplines, as they cannot remain siloed in sustainability courses. It must be embedded in finance, strategy, operations, entrepreneurship, and leadership training.
• Training the trainers and ensuring faculty readiness, as many business professors were not trained in sustainability-related topics. Equipping them to teach these subjects is crucial.
• Bridging theory and practice, bringing climate and nature education beyond theoretical frameworks, and providing hands-on, business-driven solutions.
• Shifting from short-termism to long-term impact. Many companies, and thus many business curricula, are still focused on short-term financial performance. We must reframe success around long-term resilience and value creation.

All these gaps point in the same direction, which is that enabling businesses to become true drivers of sustainability requires systemic change: a transformation of micro and macro-economics, which business schools and universities can help influence. Yet, that transformation impulse must also be held at all levels of our global economic system.

BS4CL is a partnership of eight leading European business schools: Cambridge Judge Business School, HEC Paris, IE Business School, IESE Business School, INSEAD, International Institute for Management Development (IMD), London Business School (LBS), and Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. We are committed to equipping leaders with the knowledge and tools to drive climate action in business. Our mission is to generate and disseminate research, insights, and thought leadership that help executives, students, and policymakers accelerate the climate transition.

Traditionally, business schools compete for students, rankings, and corporate partnerships. But climate change and nature loss are too big for competition. The size and systemic nature of the challenge call for collaborative approaches. No single institution can develop the full range of insights, tools, and leadership training needed to address this crisis. By collaborating, we share research and best practices, and we create a stronger, unified voice, making it easier to influence corporate strategy and policy. In the fight against climate change and nature loss, competition slows progress—collaboration accelerates it.

BS4CL is actively driving climate leadership through several key initiatives:

• Global PhD Course: This course prepares the next generation of scholars to address organisational challenges in the climate transition. The 2025 edition has grown significantly, attracting over 200 applications from 30 countries, demonstrating the increasing demand for academic rigor in climate leadership.
• BS4CL Climate Leadership Conferences and Events: We organise conference events focusing on advancing interdisciplinary research and practical applications of climate leadership in business. By bringing together academics and industry leaders, these events foster research collaboration that can accelerate business decarbonisation. We also participate in high-impact events, such as the workshop co-hosted with InTent during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 and the upcoming ChangeNOW event in Paris (April 2025). Such events present valuable opportunities to engage with top executives, policymakers, and academics to drive meaningful change.
• Network Building for Impact: BS4CL collaborates with two independently founded regional clusters: BS4CL Africa and BS4CL Middle East. This fosters a comprehensive approach to sustainable business practices and leadership, harnessing the diverse expertise and insights from each cluster to drive impactful global initiatives.

While these initiatives don’t yet have a unified measurement framework, our collective efforts are visible through the increasing reach of our programmes, the depth of faculty collaboration, and the influence of our thought leadership and alumni engagement in their field (we see more graduates actively contributing to the transition).

At the level of specific competencies, there is already a growing trend to incorporate sustainability-related skills and competencies into general management and other more specialised areas (e.g., accounting, finance). For instance, systems thinking, sustainability values, and purpose leadership are key topical areas of competence building for general management. More specialised competencies, such as carbon and nature accounting, circular business models, climate resilience, and risk management, are examples of specific knowledge and tools that are essential requirements for new functions driven by the integration of climate and nature in business strategies, such as ESG or carbon managers.

In terms of curriculum trends, we expect that in the next ten years, climate and nature leadership will become a fundamental pillar of business education, driving major transformations such as:

• Embedding sustainability in all business functions from finance, strategy, operations, and leadership courses,
• Focusing on hands-on learning, engaging students directly with climate-related business challenges through live projects, internships (e.g., the InTent Internship Programme), and applied research,
• Complementing the training of executives, ensuring they have the skills to lead the climate transition as it keeps evolving,
• Collaborating more tightly with industry and corporations to co-develop knowledge and drive business model innovation.

To go further: Read the BS4CL Toolkit.