The business case for climate action is strengthening. So why aren’t we moving faster?

There was a revealing moment at the Caring for Climate High-Level Meeting at COP31 in Antalya this week.

Onur Genç, CEO of global bank BBVA, offered a remarkably straightforward assessment of the climate transition.

The good news? It’s becoming unstoppable because the economics increasingly make sense.

The bad news? It’s moving far too slowly.

That tension ran through almost every contribution from business leaders, scientists, investors and policymakers in the room.

We have technologies that work. We have companies ready to invest. We have growing evidence that responsible business practices can deliver commercial value.

Yet the transition is not happening at anything close to the speed the science demands.

So what’s actually holding us back?

The economics are changing. The systems aren’t keeping pace.

Consider some of the examples shared during the meeting.

At BBVA, 89% of clients across the bank’s ten targeted carbon-intensive sectors now have transition plans, according to Genç. Businesses increasingly recognise the competitive and commercial reasons for investing in decarbonisation.

But banks financing projects over 15 or 20 years need some confidence in future revenues. If policy settings change every few years, otherwise attractive projects become difficult to finance.

At IKEA, sustainability is embedded in product design alongside quality, function and affordability. The company has helped around 600 direct suppliers transition to 100% renewable electricity.

Yet sourcing recycled materials at the right quality, volume and price remains a persistent challenge. IKEA can redesign products and invest in innovation, but it cannot build the entire recycling economy on its own.

EDP, the global energy company, shared practical examples of industrial electrification, including a thermal battery solution developed with Heineken to replace fossil fuels in industrial heating.

The technologies exist. But grid constraints, infrastructure investment, permitting and policy uncertainty continue to limit how quickly they can be deployed.

Different industries. Different challenges. A remarkably consistent conclusion.

The barriers to climate implementation increasingly sit between organisations, sectors and institutions, rather than neatly within individual companies.

That’s a systems-change problem.

Not every climate solution has the same economic challenge

Ankit Todi from Mahindra Group made an important distinction.

Some climate solutions are already commercially viable. Renewables, energy efficiency and electrification increasingly fall into this category.

Here, the task is to accelerate deployment, remove obstacles and direct capital where it can deliver the greatest impact.

Other solutions, particularly adaptation, ecosystem restoration and parts of the circular economy, still struggle to make commercial sense under existing market conditions.

Not necessarily because they lack value, but because our economic systems fail to account adequately for the costs of environmental damage or the benefits of prevention.

A contribution from the UN Resident Coordinator in Nepal brought this into sharp focus.

Following catastrophic flooding, businesses had helped maintain agricultural supply chains, using returning relief transport to move farmers’ products to market.

But many affected businesses and households lacked insurance. Rebuilding resilient infrastructure and restoring livelihoods would require access to finance, technology and expertise.

The economic value of resilience is obvious when disaster strikes. Yet our systems frequently struggle to finance it beforehand.

This matters because we cannot rely on commercial incentives alone to deliver every element of the transition.

Some solutions need faster deployment. Others need changes to how markets value risk, resilience and environmental outcomes.

Confusing the two risks producing policies that solve neither.

Transparency is necessary, but it isn’t delivery.

Another theme was the growing maturity of climate reporting and transition planning.

Simon Stiell announced that the UN Climate Change Net Zero Recognition Framework is moving from pilot to implementation, using the NAZCA portal to make corporate and other non-state actors’ commitments and progress more visible.

Helena Viñes Fiestas, Co-Chair of the Taskforce on Net Zero Policy, argued that disclosure, transition planning, sustainable finance taxonomies and prudential regulation are now substantially established across major economies.

The next challenge is making these frameworks useful for decisions.

Are companies actually reducing emissions? Is capital reaching the projects that need it? Are policies delivering the intended results?

The risk is that we become very good at documenting the transition without becoming equally good at delivering it.

Reporting should be the foundation for better investment, policy and business decisions, not an end in itself.

And the science isn’t waiting.

Johan Rockström opened the discussion with a sobering assessment of the risks of exceeding 1.5°C.

Beyond the immediate impacts on communities and economies, he highlighted the growing risk of triggering irreversible changes in major Earth systems, from ice sheets and ocean circulation to the Amazon rainforest.

His message was unequivocal: exceeding 1.5°C does not make the target irrelevant. It makes the speed and scale of action even more critical.

That urgency can be difficult to reconcile with the political mood in some countries.

But as a researcher from Oxford reminded the room, the backlash against climate action is not necessarily the dominant trend.

Corporate commitments and supporting policy frameworks have continued to expand in many markets, even as opposition has become louder.

We should not confuse the volume of the debate with the direction of underlying economic change.

Nor should commercial momentum become an excuse for complacency.

The transition may be accelerating, but it is still not moving fast enough.

The leadership this requires

Perhaps the most important challenge came from Ani Dasgupta, President and CEO of the World Resources Institute, who chaired the meeting.

He asked participants to identify the barriers that individual companies cannot overcome, but that collective action could help resolve.

And he made a particularly important point: business needs to engage in policy.

Governments need to hear directly from businesses about what would make investment possible.

Not simply broad requests for greater ambition, but specific, evidence-based proposals.

Where are grid connections preventing investment? Where do inconsistent standards make circular products uneconomic? Where is the cost of capital preventing adaptation? Where are current incentives rewarding the very activities we need to move away from?

And crucially, what combination of government action, business collaboration and finance would change those conditions?

That is a different kind of business leadership.

It requires companies to look beyond their own targets and engage with the wider systems on which their transition depends.

It also requires responsible, transparent policy engagement aligned with credible climate goals, rather than narrow advocacy for individual commercial advantage.

This is where I see an increasingly important role for organisations like the UN Global Compact.

Our ability to bring businesses together, connect them with government and finance, and create opportunities for collective action is not simply a benefit of participation.

It is fundamental to accelerating implementation.

Sanda Ojiambo, CEO of the UN Global Compact, reinforced this in her closing remarks, inviting businesses to work through Global Compact networks at country and regional levels to engage policymakers.

The next phase of climate leadership cannot just be about helping businesses make better commitments.

It must also be about helping create the conditions in which those commitments can be delivered.

And ultimately, demonstrating the outcomes.

Because the challenge before us is no longer simply whether businesses are ready to act.

It’s whether we can change the systems around them quickly enough to make that action possible at scale.

The Transition Briefing explores the changing landscape of responsible business, sustainability and the leadership needed to navigate complex transitions.

A question for business leaders: What’s the biggest barrier to your organisation’s transition that you cannot solve alone?