Five Key Steps for Building a Climate-Competent Board

Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. appointed a leading climate scientist to its board. Exxon’s move underscores the growing pressure shareholders are exerting on the issue of climate-competent boards.

Climate competency of boards—and broader corporate attention to escalating climate change risks—isn’t just a hot topic for one set of shareholders and one oil company. It is a key investor imperative for all sectors of the economy.

Look no further than the new guidelines from the G20’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure to understand how profoundly expectations are shifting. The task force, chaired by Michael R. Bloomberg, was created by the Financial Stability Board at the request of the G20 ministers to help companies identify and disclose which climate risks have a financially relevant impact on their business. The task force’s very first recommendation focuses on the governance practices of companies for climate change, including deeper board engagement on the topic.

So what does it mean for boards to be climate competent? Climate competency means much more than just getting one person with expertise on a corporate board. So while we applaud the important step that Exxon has taken, it’s only a first step.

At the end of the day, a climate-competent board is one that can make thoughtful decisions on climate risks and opportunities that a company is facing. When trying to set up a climate-competent board, companies should think holistically about what needs to be done for boards to achieve competent, informed decision-making on this issue.

Based on a recent Ceres report I wrote on this topic, View from The Top: How Corporate Boards can Engage on Sustainability Performance, here are a few key steps boards should take.

1.) Put board systems in place for climate change oversight. Boards need to have a committee that is assigned formal responsibility to oversee climate change. By doing so, companies can ensure that boards oversee how climate risks are integrated into operations and decision-making on an ongoing basis. Numerous companies have dedicated board sustainability or environment committees that can be leveraged for this purpose. Companies like Citigroup, Ford, and PG&E have specifically identified climate change as a key focus area in the charters of their board public affairs or sustainability committees. Having the issue identified in such an explicit manner ensures it will be discussed systematically in committee meetings.

2.) Include directors with expertise in climate change on boards. When climate change is a material risk to a company, boards should recruit directors with expertise on that material issue. Such companies should also explicitly identify climate change expertise as a board qualification. This means making it a part of board skill matrices. It’s worth noting that two of the country’s largest pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, recently amended their global governance guidelines to ask portfolio companies to recruit directors with climate change expertise.

3.) Train the full board on climate change. Boards and management should provide climate-related training opportunities to all board members, or, at a minimum, to relevant committee members. Organizations like The Co-operators have detailed systems in place to train its board on sustainability issues that are crucial to their businesses, including leveraging external experts for this purpose. Certain groups offer education curriculums where issues like climate and sustainability are addressed.

4.) Consult stakeholders and shareholders to inform directors’ understanding of climate change. Internal training sessions are key, but it’s just as important that directors reach out to external stakeholders, including investors, to share firsthand the company’s different approaches to climate change learn from voices outside of management. Investors in particular are critical groups to engage. Having this broader multi-stakeholder perspective can help directors make better-informed decisions. In 2016, shareholders filed a record 172 shareholder resolutions on climate change and sustainability. Given that directors are fiduciaries to investors, director-investor dialogues on climate trends will provide an important context to board discussions on this issue.

5.) Be more transparent. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need more transparency on climate-related board decisions. We need to know whether boards are prioritizing climate change as a material issue. Companies have to do a better job of disclosing how climate trends are affecting corporate strategies and risks that are relevant to investors.

Market and shareholder scrutiny of board engagement on climate issues is only going to grow sharper with time. While companies will be impacted differently by these risks, few industries are immune. Climate change affects 72 out of 79 industries and 93 percent of the capital markets, according to SASB’s Technical Bulletin on Climate Risk.

The key for board members now is to ensure that they’re well positioned to exercise informed oversight so that they can make thoughtful decisions on this escalating issue.

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Veena Ramani is program director, Capital Market Systems, at Ceres.