Headline: Weaknesses in Corporate Commitments to Climate Change Adaptation and How to Fix Them: A Systemic Scenario Assessment Approach

The climate is already changing, making climate change adaptation (CCA) an essential component of any sustainable development strategy. Similarly, the capacities of different actors to adapt to climate change are significantly affected by social and economic factors including nutrition, health, and employment. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) characterize progress toward the aforementioned factors as well as CCA through targets under SDG 13 (Climate Action). More recently, the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) illustrates the interactions within and between SDGs, showing how many other SDGs influence progress toward CCA and vice versa. Businesses need to be mindful of these complex interdependencies when developing risk management, supply chain management, and sustainability strategies to make effective contributions to CCA while avoiding ineffective or maladaptive strategies. In this chapter, we demonstrate these interdependencies by modeling the interactions defined in the 2019 GSDR using the cross-impact balances (CIB) method, which identifies self-reinforcing scenarios and traces the systemic effects of interventions. We focus our analysis on how existing global business priorities may push the system toward certain scenarios over others, centering the implications for CCA. Through our analysis, we find six self-reinforcing scenarios for global SDGs, half of which indicate progress in CCA. We also identify six SDGs that appear critical to achieving all SDGs, highlighting gaps in current business efforts and areas for additional focus. Among these critical SDGs is SDG 13 (Climate Action), reaffirming the importance of CCA in progress toward sustainable development.