Executives’ climate change awareness on rise globally, less so in Germany

The executives of companies worldwide are becoming increasingly concerned about climate change, but in Germany less so in global comparison, said accounting and consultancy organisation Deloitte based on its “CxO Sustainability Survey 2022”. The survey also showed that German executives were more reluctant than their global counterparts to implement concrete climate-friendly measures. “While executives around the world are taking the urgency of climate change much more seriously than they did a year or two ago, it seems that German boards in particular still feel too little pressure to consistently address the far from minor sustainability challenges,” said Thomas Schlaak, lead sustainability partner at Deloitte. He said this was due to the fact that companies in Germany have so far felt the changes mostly in regulatory reforms, but less so in the actual consequences of a changing climate on their operations. “So far, boards in this country think that climate action will have a positive impact mainly on soft KPIs (key performance indicators), such as brand, customer satisfaction, morale and recruiting, and less on hard KPIs, such as turnover and margin,” he said. Deloitte surveyed more than 2,000 executives in 21 countries, 105 of which in Germany.

The effects of climate change are more severe in other parts of the world, but they can increasingly be felt also in Germany, for example as extreme weather events become more intense and happen more frequently. Together with regulatory reforms resulting from more ambitious climate action, these effects mean Germany’s businesses have to adapt their operations.