The risks of inaction and lack of co-operation of the business world with regard to climate change will have far reaching and in some instances devastating impacts on traditional business models.

Extreme weather, natural disasters, reduced productivity:
For businesses, more frequent and more intense weather is becoming increasingly significant. It disrupts operations and transportation. It damages commercial premises. It can dislocate customers, reduce consumer demand and purchasing power. And it can completely change the risk equation of where and how companies can operate profitably. Insurer Swiss Re calculates that natural disasters cost approximately US$230 billion in 2005; the insurance industry was on the hook for a third of that total.

Insurance Risk and Costs:
The potential impacts of climate change on the insurance industry can already be seen in the bottom line. While no individual natural event can be directly attributed to climate change, the increase in incidence and ferocity of storms and hurricanes is increasingly being linked to climate shifts. Growing concern over climate change is leading some insurers to provide incentives for actions that mitigate the effects of climate change. Business continuity is now a topic for companies that were never thinking that far. Learn how to implement Business Continuity plans and comply with insurance and other risks from business as usual.

Loss of Customers and market share:
Consumer Preferences are changing. Lagging action will become a larger issue as consumer concerns and preferences shift. A recent study identified the airline, food and beverages sectors as the most vulnerable to reputation damage due to climate change inaction and concluded that climate change would become a mainstream consumer issue by 2010

Costs of adaptation to extreme weather events:
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita proved how crippling the new and improved strain of natural disasters can be. As climate change accelerates, business will have to adapt to many these more extreme weather events. This will be accompanied by a hefty price tag. Scientific evidence shows that climate chaos is increasing faster than previously thought. If industry wants to survive, it must adapt sooner rather than later.

Legal Risks:
Lawsuits and fines are becoming more common. Similar to the multibillion dollar lawsuits against the cigarette industry, no idustry will be exempt from legal action if they continue to have a huge impact on GHG emissionsm and are not being seen to be improving their operations. E.g. The State of California has sued GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota and Nissan, on the grounds that greenhouse gases from the companies' vehicles have caused billions of dollars in damages. In the UK 6 companies including Mars, were given fines for not doing enough to curtail their emissions

The debate is over:
Political dialogue has shifted from whether climate change is happening to how to address it. An ever-increasing number of regulatory, policy and legal drivers for climate change action, both internationally and within countries such as the U.S., make corporate strategies to manage climate risk more important.The 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to represent "a level of consensus unusual for the scientific community."

Public Opinion has shifted:
Extreme weather is becoming more difficult for the general public to ignore and increasingly difficult for climate change skeptics to explain. The past decade had eight of the hottest years on record. Hurricanes are increasingly frequent and intense, most vividly illustrated by images of New Orleans underwater. The melting of Artic glaciers is occurring at rates faster than scientific models anticipated. The temperature increases are tracking with human emissions of greenhouse gases. Scientists assert that these data points mean that we have already entered the era of adaptation to climate change.