When climate change is framed as a business risk, we are not truly confronting an ecological crisis—we are rehearsing the dominant epistemology of instrumental rationality. The environment becomes not a moral commons, but a contingent variable in quarterly returns.

Language is never innocent. As Derrida insisted, every word carries a remainder; it shapes the world it describes. To call climate change a “risk” is already to defer responsibility—a différance that recodes moral catastrophe into managerial calculation. It is a violence by abstraction, permitting business-as-usual to continue under the comforting illusion of “pragmatic adaptation.”

Foucault named this logic governmentality: the transformation of “responsibility” into efficiency, calculability, and optimisation. Under this regime, the central question quietly shifts from “What are we doing to the world?” to “How do we hedge our cash flow?” The "responsible" actor is no longer the moral one, but the efficient one.

But risk management is not ethics. Risk does not mourn. Risk does not apologise. It insulates, it calculates, it forgets.

Worse, the framing flips agency. In risk language, we are cast as the potential victims of climate instability. But this is false. We are not the endangered party. We are the endangering one. The Earth is not threatening us with catastrophe; we have become the catastrophe.

The finance sector illustrates the problem perfectly. Banks now develop “transition risk” models to assess exposure to decarbonisation policies. These tools help institutions protect returns—not transform behaviour. The result is the same: climate change is understood through the grammar of asset protection rather than moral obligation.

This is why our task as business leaders is not merely to face another business risk, but to confront the morality of business itself. We do not need better predictive models; we need a different ethical vocabulary.

Jean-Luc Nancy wrote: “Wherever there is risk, there is already the other who suffers it.” This is the truth we bury when we treat climate destabilisation as a portfolio variable. Climate risk is not a stochastic fluctuation. It is a relational violence—distributed asymmetrically across generations, regions, and species.

So the question is not: How do we manage climate risk?
The real question is: How do we stop producing it?

It is not the planet that needs saving.
It is us—from our worldview that has made this catastrophe possible.

#Leadership #Ethics #ClimateJustice #Transformation #CriticalThinking