In this piece for Board Agenda, Gudrun Cartwright argues that boards today face a world characterised by increasing volatility — geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty, climate disruption and widening social inequality no longer sit as isolated risks, but as interconnected forces reshaping the context businesses operate in.
Her case is that navigating this successfully means going beyond climate alone, to what she calls a "just transition" — managing systemic change in ways that share its benefits and burdens fairly, rather than treating decarbonisation as a standalone risk to manage.
The argument is grounded in this summer's events: extreme heat and wildfires across Europe, disrupted food production, extreme weather affecting supply chains across Asia, layered on top of the ongoing economic impact of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. Cartwright's point isn't that these are separate crises to track individually, but that business resilience is now inseparable from the resilience of the communities, supply chains and natural systems companies depend on.
The piece sets out why this has become a governance question rather than a sustainability one, and what boards should actually be asking: how future-proof their business model really is, what environmental and social dependencies create hidden vulnerability, and whether transition plans are creating opportunity for people, not just reducing risk. It also pushes back on compliance-led thinking, arguing that reporting and disclosure alone won't prepare organisations for the volatility ahead, and makes a case for treating resource resilience and nature as genuine strategic priorities rather than peripheral concerns.
Cartwright closes on what this means for board leadership itself — more willingness to devolve responsibility, engage stakeholders as partners rather than audiences, and measure outcomes that go beyond financial performance alone. Her conclusion is blunt: the question for directors isn't whether transition is coming, but whether their organisation is ready to lead it.
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Read the full article at the link here.
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