The first key finding of the Business and Climate Change Adaptation Observatory concerns the growing gap between organizations' public statements and the reality of the risks they are already facing.
Climate Impacts are Already Being Felt
The summer of 2026 did more than confirm the conclusions of this report: it made them tangible. Businesses and citizens are now on the front line of climate disruption. More than one hundred municipalities had to be supplied with drinking water by tanker trucks, wildfires burned more than 115,000 hectares of forest, and numerous factories, farms and construction sites had to slow their operations, bring forward harvests, suspend work or reorganize their schedules.
These disruptions affect everything from employees' ability to work outdoors to supply chains, childcare arrangements and transportation. They are impacting sectors as diverse as healthcare, industry and agriculture.
Several economic analyses published this summer point in the same direction: extreme heat could reduce French economic growth by more than one percentage point of GDP in 2026. The government, for its part, has estimated the direct and indirect cost of the 2026 season at between €10 billion and €15 billion.
"The summer we have just experienced confirms what we document in this Observatory: businesses can no longer treat climate change as a distant and abstract risk. It is already an operational reality," says Aurélien Acquier, co-author of the study.
Beware of Still waters: Beneath the Apparent calm, Risks are Accumulating
Most businesses feel they have begun to address the issue: climate reporting is improving, regulatory frameworks such as the CSRD are developing, and resilience measures often show favourable returns on investment. However, according to the Observatory, this reassuring picture conceals a more fragile reality.
While mitigation can be measured with increasing precision, adaptation remains largely qualitative and difficult to compare from one report to another. Moreover, identifying and addressing a risk can be costly, while the associated benefits remain diffuse. The result is confident messaging on the surface, even as vulnerabilities continue to accumulate.
In response to these limitations, the study proposes a new framework for understanding climate risks: the "PUSH" framework. This acronym refers to four structural characteristics that distinguish climate risks from traditional risks and explain why conventional risk-management methods struggle to address them:
- Predetermined: Some of the warming to come is already locked in by decades of past emissions
- Unique: There is no historical precedent that allows the scale of future damage to be estimated accurately
- Systemic: Risks spread through supply chains, financial systems, infrastructure and territories, creating cascading effects that are difficult to anticipate
- Heterogeneous: Risks vary considerably according to geography, sector and business model
This framework has significant implications for businesses: the uncertainty surrounding climate risks is not a temporary problem that will disappear as data becomes more precise. It is structural and inherent to the very nature of these risks. However advanced their quantification methods may become, businesses will never be able to eliminate this uncertainty entirely.
This requires a change in mindset. Rather than waiting for quantified certainty before taking action, businesses must learn to make decisions and build resilience in a context where uncertainty will remain the norm.
Five Recommendations for Building Genuine Resilience
In response to this situation, the Observatory puts forward five recommendations to help businesses prepare more effectively:
- Strengthen understanding of climate risks at the highest levels of the organization
- Learn to make decisions in a context of radical uncertainty
- Move from exposure to vulnerability, drawing more heavily on the field-based knowledge of operational teams
- Explore disruption scenarios to stress-test the organization's true resilience
- Build resilience collectively by integrating climate risk into governance and developing active cooperation
"No business can adapt alone. The goal is not to eliminate climate risk, but to learn collectively how to live, make decisions and act amid uncertainty," says Antoine Poincaré, Managing Director of Apave Climate School.
An Observatory Designed to Equip Business Decision-Makers
Based on nearly a year of work involving researchers, experts and businesses, and informed by their practical experience, this Observatory is intended for executives, risk, CSR and sustainability departments, as well as all stakeholders concerned with organizational resilience in the face of climate change.