The former boss of Unilever is seeking a team of “heroic chief executives” to drive a shift to a low-carbon, more inclusive way of doing business.

Paul Polman, who stepped down from the Anglo-Dutch owner of Marmite and Dove in November last year after a decade at the helm, warns that the rise of populism and Brexit are symptoms of capitalism’s failure to adapt. Bosses, he insists, must commit to fighting inequality and tackling the climate emergency.

“We are about to commit the biggest intergenerational crime in the history of mankind. We need to bring us together not drive us apart,” said the 63-year-old Dutchman, who won plaudits for pushing the benefits of sustainable business long before it became fashionable.

“If you don’t address inequality and climate change, to keep it simple, a lot more people are going to be dissatisfied, feel not included or left behind, and making these choices of rejection at the ballot box. The fact we are having these issues of populism and schisms in society is exactly because we are not addressing the underlying issue to evolve capitalism and make sure it works for everybody,” he said.

He believes the starting point is “heroic chief executives willing to step up and move outside of the comfort zone and take personal risks. I tried to do the same with Unilever. It’s a matter of willpower.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Polman says: ‘Chief executives in the private sector need to drive major change in the absence of politicians doing it right now.’ Photograph: Piroschka van de Wouw/EPA

Polman has backed his words with cash by investing in Imagine, a foundation to push the UN’s sustainable development goals. But he has several other projects on the go, including helping the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and François-Henri Pinault, the boss of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent owner Kering, to develop a fashion-industry deal to cut waste and carbon emissions that is set to be announced at the G7 meeting in Biarritz next month. Polman said the aim is to get a fifth of the industry on board. He his hoping that signatories including the Calvin Klein owner PVH, H&M and Inditex, the owner of Zara, will inspire others.

Polman is also backing an initiative that adopts similar tactics to advance disability rights, Valuable 500. The campaign, which is aiming to recruit 500 chief executives of major companies who commit to putting disability on their board agenda this year, has just won the backing of seven major financial institutions, including the Bank of England, HSBC and Lloyds. The banks join existing signatories, including Barclays, Accenture, Microsoft, Virgin Media and Sainsbury’s.

“We are trying to create tipping points on a sectorial level. The premise is that chief executives in the private sector need to drive major change in the absence of politicians doing it right now. Not exclusively but actively helping de-risk the political process,” Polman said.

“Over the next 10 years more responsibility will be put on business to move faster to implement the [UN’s] sustainability goals simply because of financial flow that needs to happen that cannot come right now from government.”

With only 100 companies responsible for 71% of carbon emissions , persuading a handful of these bosses to see the economic and moral benefit of changing their ways can create a race to the top, according to Polman.

The boss who has publicly backed the young people behind Extinction Rebellion and is a fan of the teenage activist Greta Thunberg, said businesses that do not embrace issues of diversity, sustainability and equal rights will also struggle to attract talented young workers.

“Millennials want to work for companies that stand for more than just making money.”

Polman said he is no longer ridiculed for suggesting that tackling climate change makes business sense and that companies are also beginning to see that addressing equal rights is just as important.

“We are now at a point in society where the cost of not acting in these areas is higher than acting. It is becoming mainstream. It comes down to humans, that’s the missing element,” Polman said.

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Caroline Casey, the founder of the Valuable 500 campaign, hopes that persuading key business leaders, such as Richard Branson, who has dyslexia, to be more open about their own disabilities and take action to make their companies more inclusive will demonstrate change is “good for business, good for people with disability and good for society in general”.

She points out that there are about 13m people with disabilities in the UK who, together with their families, have a spending power of £249bn. However, businesses pay them far less attention than vegans, for example, who number less than one million.

People with disabilities are also valuable employees who may be concealing non-obvious conditions such as autism, mental health problems or even blindness in the workplace.

“There’s a cost to exclusion because we’re not releasing potential,” Casey said.