More companies are making climate change one of their top sustainability priorities, according to a survey released this week by nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility, which counts big brands like consumer goods giant Unilever and food and beverage maker Coca-Cola among its members.

The annual survey, which polled 440 sustainability workers from nearly 200 companies around the world, aims to provide a snapshot of what environmental and social issues are important to businesses over the coming year.

Two-thirds of respondents said climate change would be a focus over the next 12 months, more than a 5% jump from last year. Human rights and workers’ rights rounded out the top three sustainability priorities for companies.

“[Prioritizing] climate change has been on a steady decline since 2011, so it’s quite a noticeable increase this year,” said BSR vice president Laura Gitman. “There’s been a much greater focus on what risks and opportunities climate change poses to businesses.”

It marks a difference from a PwC report back in January, in which climate change ranked so low on the risk of chief executives’ list of concerns that it didn’t even make the survey. The threat of climate change to the global economy has come to the fore in the past year, with various reports from governments and business leaders estimating the damage from natural disasters and rising sea levels to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

On Tuesday, Mike Carney, the governor of the UK’s Bank of England, warned that climate change carried potentially “huge” financial risks, stating that, “once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late”.

According to the BSR survey, companies are starting to heed the call to action and are making sustainability part of their core business. Almost seven in 10 companies said that sustainability was at least “fairly well-integrated” in areas like products and strategic planning, marking a change from previous years, according to Gitman.

“This year, quite a number of spontaneous responses talked about internal changes, [like] a number of leadership commitments that helped set a platform for sustainability, or the establishment of key goals and KPIs,” she said. “This was consistent across industries.”

On issues of climate change, more than 80% of respondents said reducing their carbon footprint in their operations was a priority, while almost half are looking to do the same in their supply chains. Companies in all markets, including North America, Europe and Asia, called for more regulations on climate change, while North American companies were more concerned about budget constraints to implement climate change measures than businesses in other countries.



Companies are also looking to international policy agreements to guide their sustainability decisions. One third of respondents said they planned to use the recently adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the upcoming COP21 climate change conference to inform their sustainability efforts, specifically when setting targets like cutting carbon emissions or zero deforestation.

Some companies will focus on a particular goal, like gender equality or zero hunger, said Gitman, while others will look at all 17 goals and start to map which ones make the most sense to pursue for their business.

“Companies in general have struggled to demonstrate impact, but [the SDGs] will enable the corporate community to align towards a common way of talking about impact,” she said.

While it’s promising that businesses are showing a commitment to “real change” and prioritizing issues like climate change and human rights abuses, more work needs to be done, Gitman added.

“We still have all of the same issues that have come up every year since 2010,” she said. “We need to really scale up solutions and collaborations to address these issues so that they drop in importance.”