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Our World Has a Fever, It Is a Time for  Leadership — Not Management 

By James Boyle

For more than 15 years, Sustainability Roundtable Inc. has helped the Directors of Sustainability and CSOs of the Global 1,000 navigate accelerating global change. Over those years a single truth has become increasingly clear:

Corporate Sustainability must lead in safeguarding enterprise value in a world whose operating conditions are destabilizing.

This truth was recognized long ago by pioneers such as Bob Massie — co-founder of Ceres and the Global Reporting Initiative — who understood that a warming and increasingly stressed world would eventually require corporations to play a more strategic, more responsible, and more human role in global stability.  Today, that moment has arrived.  And two leaders exemplify the kind of clarity and courage this era demands:

Kate Brandt of Google and Melanie Nakagawa of Microsoft.

To understand why, we must first face the world they are preparing global enterprises to survive and serve within.

1. Exceeding 1.5 °C Means Entering a New Operating Age

The IPCC has long made clear that 1.5 °C is not an aspirational target; it is an ecological threshold. Beyond it, risks do not rise gradually — they accelerate. Extreme heat, flooding, crop failure, political instability, and the suffering of vulnerable communities all increase sharply (IPCC SR1.5; AR6 WGII).

The simplest analogy is to a human baby.

A rise of 3 °C in an infant’s body temperature — from 37 °C (98.6 °F) to roughly 40 °C (104 °F) — is not merely a more severe fever. It is a medical emergency, a sign of systemic distress. At that moment no parent talks about “efficiency.” They step into leadership.

A world tracking toward 2.5–3 °C of warming is that infant — systems under stress, tipping points closer, risks cascading.

This is not a scenario for management.  It is a moment for leadership.

2. The Electrotech Revolution Has Reduced the Worst Outcomes — But Not the Urgent Need for Leadership

The London-based think tank Ember has documented in extraordinary detail the global Electrotech Revolution — the rapid rise of solar, wind, batteries, EVs, heat pumps, digital controls, and AI-enabled efficiency. Thanks to this revolution, driven in part by companies like Google and Microsoft, the world is far less likely to see the catastrophic 4–5 °C warming trajectories once feared.

Yet even this remarkable progress leaves us heading toward roughly 2.5–3 °C without bold global action.

We avoided the unthinkable.  We did not avoid the dangerous. The fever is still rising. And leadership is required. 

3. The Astonishing Dissonance: Corporate Scenario Planning vs. National Security Climate Planning

One of the least discussed — but most consequential — gaps in modern governance is the vast difference between:

• how corporate managers have traditionally modeled climate risk, and

• how national security strategists have modeled climate risk.

Corporate climate scenarios have been guided for decades by pathways derived from William Nordhaus’s DICE model, which projected that even at 4 °C warming the global economy might decline only 2–3% by 2100. These assumptions — still embedded in many TCFD-aligned templates — implied a future that was serious but manageable.

The climate and national security community has never worked from those assumptions.

For more than 20 years, military, intelligence, and geopolitical strategists have used climate scenarios rooted in Earth-system science, not abstract 20th-century economic damage functions. Their models and assessments account for:

• tipping points,

• nonlinear physical dynamics,

• political destabilization,

• food-system breakdowns,

• mass migration,

• and systemic economic shocks.

The divergence is astonishing.  Corporate climate planning was built around linear, optimistic economic curves.

National security climate planning was built around realism. That included difficult to predict but inevitable second order effects. 

And today it is the national security view — not the DICE-based corporate view — that aligns with modern science.

This is why the most sophisticated institutions, including the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund (Norges Bank Investment Management), now cite research showing that warming of 3–4 °C could cause global GDP losses of 30–40% — not the 2–3% predicted by the DICE lineage.

The old models are becoming indefensible. They simply do not reflect the world we now inhabit and the world most informed expect. 

And as Corporate Sustainability shifts from management to leadership, the people who have trained in national-security realism — like Kate Brandt and Melanie Nakagawa — become the faces of the future.

4. Mandatory Reporting Has Formalized What SR Inc Has Said for 15 Years

The rise of CSRD, CSDDD, IFRS/ISSB, SECR, and similar frameworks signals a historic shift:

Corporate Sustainability is now squarely a shaping part of Enterprise Risk and Opportunity Management.

These frameworks require:

• scenario analysis,

• human rights due diligence,

• double materiality,

• transition planning,

• and board-level accountability.

For global companies, this is not just about transparency.  It is about confronting the world as it is — and governing accordingly.

5. Fiduciary Duty Requires Leadership, Not Rhetoric

Under U.S. law and nearly all global corporate governance regimes, directors owe:

1. A duty of loyalty — to act in the long-term interests of the corporation.

2. A duty of care — to make informed decisions based on foreseeable risks.

Climate risk — physical, transition, geopolitical, and social — is foreseeable and regularly material.  Anti-ESG rhetoric does not change fiduciary duty.

Directors cannot legally ignore risks that Earth-system science, intelligence agencies, central banks, insurers, and sovereign wealth funds are already integrating.  The world is changing faster than corporate management frameworks.  Leadership is needed to  close that gap.

6. The Next Generation of CSOs Must Be Human Leaders and Geopolitical Interpreters

A modern CSO does not need to personally conduct water modeling or biodiversity assessments.

They can hire subject-matter experts. What they cannot delegate is leadership.  The CSO of the future must be:

• a student of geopolitics,

• informed in global, regional, and local affairs,

• a culturally adaptive communicator,

• a builder of trust across communities and supply chains,

• a translator between science and strategy,

• and a champion of human dignity inside and outside the enterprise.

They must understand that climate strategy is human strategy — aligned with the UN Guiding Principles, SDGs, and the commitments embedded in the Paris Agreement to protect the most vulnerable.

This is not managing complexity.  It is leading human beings through it.  And this is exactly what Kate Brandt and Melanie Nakagawa embody.

7. Two Leaders for Our Age

Kate Brandt — shaped by her role as the first Federal Chief Sustainability Officer of the United States — and Melanie Nakagawa — shaped by her work on the National Security Council — bring national-security realism, geopolitical fluency, and human-centered leadership to two of the world’s most influential companies.

They are not simply integrating sustainability.

They are stewarding enterprise resilience in an age of planetary fever.

They do not lead with ideology.

They lead with clarity.

They lead with responsibility.

They lead with dignity.

And as the corporate world wakes up to the 3 °C trajectory we are realistically confronting, leaders formed in the national-security climate community — leaders like Kate Brandt and Melanie Nakagawa — will define the next generation of Corporate Sustainability leadership.

They are, unmistakably:

Two Leaders For Our Age.