What to do when your CEO is  planning for the wrong decade

The opinions expressed by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.

When Europe’s heat wave was mentioned on Jet2’s July earnings call, CEO Stephen Heapy dismissed it as a strategically unimportant blip. “I’m sure the hot weather will pass,” he told investors.

Twelve days later, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary made the same bet in different words: “One summer is not going to make any huge difference.”

This is a real management problem: Too many executives still treat climate disruption as a temporary nuisance when it has already become a permanent operating condition. For sustainability leaders, that misread hurts twice: First when their investment requests are undervalued, and again when they are not invited into the rooms where strategy gets made.

This attitude is part of the reason why more than half of the sustainability professionals I speak with believe their investment requests are perceived as “fluffy” or “nice to have.  Why CSOs are rarely listed as top executives on their company websites. And why I could find fewer than 10 CSOs who have ever become CEO of a large company.

This is not just a career problem for sustainability professionals, it is a planning problem for the business. If leaders are using yesterday’s climate assumptions to make today’s decisions about capital, supply chain, labor, insurance and customers, they are planning from the wrong baseline.

The way through is not to argue for sustainability in the abstract. It is to make the business case in the terms executives already use: baseline, cost and competitive response.

Check whether the baseline still exists

The 1970s, when many of today’s executives were growing up, were a different world. There were no personal computers, no mobile phones, no internet. There was nothing like today’s political fighting over the environment: the Clean Air Act passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 73-0.

The 70s were also cooler. In the U.K., the average summer was 13.84 degrees Celsius. That is 1.5 degrees C cooler than the last 10 summers, and more than 2 degrees cooler than the last two.

Plot each summer from 1970-2026 against what normal used to be (in this case, the average from 1961-1990) and you don’t see random variation around a stable average summer temperature. You see “normal” itself changing. The old baseline no longer exists.

Find the cost they already pay

Start with what is visible. To return to the aviation sector, over one weekend in July, heat produced 580 delayed flights in Las Vegas as temperatures hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit, then 113, then 112 degrees. 

Hot air is thinner, which means planes need more runway to get off the ground; they also must carry less. In one situation, an American Airlines gate agent offered 50 passengers a $1,500 voucher for their seats; on another flight, 32 already-seated passengers were asked to deplane so the plane could take off safely. 

Those costs are visible, so somebody is already counting them. Others are hidden: real, already being paid but not connected to sustainability objectives in a way that makes executives take notice. 

For airlines, clear-air turbulence offers an example. Incidents have risen by roughly 55 percent over the North Atlantic since 1979. University of Reading meteorologist Mark Prosser puts the cost to U.S. carriers at $150 million to $500 million a year from injuries, inspections, damage and delays. 

Airlines are hardly unique. Utilities face higher wholesale power costs and transmission strain during heat waves, which land on customer bills. Manufacturers must contend with worker-safety risks and productivity losses during extreme temperatures. Retailers and apparel companies face demand forecasting challenges as seasonal patterns become less predictable. 

The mechanism differs by industry, but the management challenge is the same: Costs that once appeared occasionally have become recurring, while historical operating assumptions become less reliable guides to future performance.

Don’t rest your case on whether the company “should” care. Find the number it already pays. Every industry has its own version of clear-air turbulence: a cost sitting inside “normal operations” that nobody has separated out, connected to sustainability and priced.

Whatever that submerged cost is for your company, quantify it. Then attach it to a metric the executive already tracks: on-time performance, claims ratios, repeat-customer revenue. Find whoever inside the company treats that risk as structural. Borrow their language and their data when talking to non-sustainability executives.

The pitch should be: “This is already on the P&L, but it’s not being named and managed.”

Show them who is already moving

A number can be dismissed. So can a competitor’s action. But it’s harder to dismiss both.

In most industries, exposure is similar across companies, but often response is not. Take insurance: The same warming that creates heat-related problems drives drought, wildfire and flooding. Those risks land on buildings and infrastructure, which means they land on insurers.

The MSCI Institute’s 2026 survey of more than 50 global insurers found 88 percent are concerned that physical risk could destabilize the financial system, and 96 percent are worried about insurability in vulnerable regions. In fact, U.S. insurers declined to renew 2.8 million policies in fire-prone ZIP codes between 2020 and 2025.

Some insurers are using today’s normal to rethink their offerings. Mercury committed to write 38,000 new policies in California (explicitly including in distressed areas), and CSAA added a three-year renewal guarantee for homeowners who earn the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home designation. Separately, Chubb built an internal team of natural catastrophe modelers to apply a forward-looking view of risk rather than a historical one.

In the airline industry, Emirates has stopped treating rising turbulence as bad luck. The airline is now among about 30 carriers sharing live turbulence data through the IATA Turbulence Aware program so aircraft can route around the worst of it.

Make today’s decisions based on today’s realities

Today’s warming trend isn’t a blip. Climatologist Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth puts the odds at 95 percent that 2027 will become the hottest year on record, beating whatever record 2026 sets first.

Some companies are waiting for this pattern to change. Others, like CSAA, Chubb and Emirates have reset their expectations for today’s normal. You can too: Find the new baseline for your company, then help update business expectations — and corresponding strategic actions — to match.