Sustainability risks—including climate change, water crises, human rights and inequality—are creating new challenges for board members to meet their fiduciary responsibilities and ensure long-term shareholder success and overall value creation.
An ideal sustainability-competent board has the requisite knowledge about material environmental and social issues that affect the business. It is able to ask the right questions, support or challenge management as needed, and ultimately make informed and thoughtful decisions affecting strategy and risk.
This report produced by Ceres (one of the founding partners of Climate Action 100+) focuses on the skills and experience needed for board members to provide thoughtful oversight of sustainability risks and opportunities. It gives concrete and actionable recommendations, tools and processes on how boards can raise their overall sustainability competence in both the short term and the long term. Now is the time for boards to rise to the challenge and use their positions as opportunities to be leaders.