Business action for climate adaptation
Building resilience for children and communities
Floods, droughts and heatwaves are destroying homes, displacing families and keeping children out of school.
Climate shocks do not stop at our doorstep. They move through every part of life, overwhelming classrooms, health clinics and local markets. They also disrupt business operations, damage infrastructure and break supply chains.
Since 2000, these shocks have inflicted over $3.6 trillion in economic losses, upending entire communities. And behind every number are children, families and workers whose lives sustain our communities and economies.
Adaptation matters
While mitigation works to reduce the causes of climate change, adaptation ensures that children, communities and businesses can continue to thrive despite its effects.
That's why adaptation is everyone’s business. Investing in climate adaptation, helps protect lives and livelihoods today and builds more resilient communities, stronger markets and better opportunities for tomorrow.
Resources: The Business Adaptation Toolkit
To help businesses turn ambition into action, UNICEF and BSR have developed a suite of practical tools that integrate climate adaptation into business strategy and investment, strengthening resilience and creating shared value for communities and children.
The Imperative for Business Action on Climate Adaptation, Ensuring Co-Benefits for Communities
Evidence and rationale for the private sector to include communities in building resilience.
8 Key Elements to Accelerate Climate Adaptation with Co-Benefits for Communities
Practical guide to integrating community resilience into corporate adaptation plans.
Strengthening Corporate Engagement with Policymakers on Community-Centered Adaptation
A policy engagement guide including policy asks to shape NDCs and NAPs for business and community resilience.
The Business Call to Action
UNICEF calls on businesses to drive collective action with governments, peers, civil society and communities. Together, we can scale adaptation efforts and investments that place communities at the heart of action, safeguard markets and build a future of shared resilience.
We call for commitment across three areas, providing a broad framework that businesses can draw on to shape their pathways to action:
call to action
- Understand how climate change affects workers, supply chains, and surrounding communities including children, not solely company operations.
- Conduct holistic risk, opportunity, and vulnerability assessments (climate, nature, human rights) that extend beyond the company’s operational confines.
- Integrate climate adaptation and community resilience into decision-making criteria for operational and supply chain activities.
- Develop corporate adaptation plans that clearly set priorities, timelines, and investments, ensuring that both business operations and communities are safeguarded from climate impacts.
- Mobilize investments in adaptation to protect vulnerable groups including children in regions with high climate risk; focus on critical social sectors such as healthcare and education.
- Recognize the shared responsibility businesses have in building resilience for people and ecosystems.
- Put communities at the center of adaptation investments, ensuring solutions avoid maladaptation, unintended negative consequences on the environment and society, and maximize social benefits.
- Establish ongoing dialogue with affected stakeholders, particularly children and youth, women, the elderly, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups, to shape effective, inclusive adaptation solutions.
- Partner with community leaders, grassroots organizations, and civil society to co-develop and implement locally tailored solutions that strengthen both community resilience and business continuity.
- Demonstrate adaptation leadership within and beyond the sector to inspire action and accelerate collective impact.
- Align business strategies with global and national frameworks (e.g., Global Goal on Adaptation, UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, and National Adaptation Plans).
- Work with peers, suppliers, governments, and finance partners to pool resources, pilot, and scale adaptation solutions.
- Actively advocate for policies that integrate community resilience into National Adaptation Plans, ensuring business voices help advance adaptation with co-benefits for communities.
- Measure outcomes and transparently disclose adaptation progress to ensure accountability and build stakeholder trust.
Partner with UNICEF
UNICEF partners with businesses, investors and networks to advance climate adaptation where it matters most, on the ground and for children and communities living on the front lines of climate change.
Join us to:
- Pilot and support climate solutions that protect children and strengthen community resilience.
- Share case studies that showcase innovation and inspire wider business action.
- Advocate to influence policy and scale collective adaptation efforts.
