If you are like the typical American, then you think climate change is a real problem, but you’re not clamoring for action. Yes, you’ve heard that the planet is getting warmer—that the sea levels are rising and, somewhere, storms probably getting worse. But it’s not something that you imagine happening to you, in your state and in your town.

For the officials and advocates trying to fight climate change, this is a huge problem. By the time people realize they have a personal stake in the environment—that it’s their own neighborhoods, livelihoods, and businesses at stake—it will be too late to act.

A new report, published on Tuesday, represents an attempt to change that. It’s called “Risky Business” and it comes from a year-long research project, convened and financed by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson, and Tom Steyer. It’s the latest in a series of new reports that sound alarms about climate change: the health effects, glaciers melting, and impact on food nutrition, to name a few. But the researchers and scientists who produced Risky Business are trying to do something a little different. Using new, more sophisticated projections, they have broken down the U.S. into the same regions used in the National Climate Assessment and attempted to show what climate change will mean for each one. They are also trying to put a dollar value on the risk climate change represents in these regions, particularly for businesses.

That last part is important. The primary audience for the report isn’t really Main Street. It’s Wall Street—and corporate boardrooms. The backers include a number of people with credibility in this world—not just Paulson, who used to run Goldman Sachs and served as Treausry Secretary in the Bush Administration, but also George Shultz (Treasury Secretary under Richard Nixon) and Olympia Snowe (the former Republican senator). Paulson, who has apparently been particularly active in this project, argued in a weekend New York Times op-ed that “risk management is a conservative principle.”

Of course, plenty of global companies think and talk about climate change already. But only a relative few—like Starbucks and Ikea—have actually have engaged in advocacy to fight climate change, and some would say even their efforts could be stronger. The real exceptions have been companies with the most obvious stake in climate change. An example is the reinsurance industry. Re-insurers sell to the insurance industry, so they have felt changes in extreme weather the most acutely: In 2012, they faced $11 billion more in privately insured property losses than the average over the last decade. Not surprisingly, the company Swiss Re has publicly discussed climate’s economic impact for years, only because they are in the front lines.