Investing for long-term business value: the importance of climate resilience

As Sustainability Development Lead at Capgemini, Edouard Le Bonté advises senior executives across the Financial Services and Energy & Utilities sectors on navigating sustainability, resilience, and business transformation. He helps organizations translate climate, geopolitical, and operational challenges into value creation. In this interview, Edouard discusses how climate resilience is reshaping the way investors assess risk and opportunity.

Capgemini’s research shows that businesses are increasingly focusing on resilience. How is this growing focus changing the way investors think about risk and opportunity?

Investors are increasingly recognizing that climate risk is a near-term business and financial issue, affecting growth, profitability, supply chains, asset values and operational continuity. The issue is no longer awareness. Financial institutions understand the potential impact of climate change, but many still struggle to translate its systemic and interconnected effects into company-level P&L, valuations and investment decisions.

Capgemini Research Institute’s latest research, A world in balance 2026: The resilience reset, highlights this execution gap. While 68% of executives say climate adaptation is now a priority and 76% expect spending to increase, only 15% of organizations fully quantify their financial exposure. Just 27% assess risks across the extended value chain, and 28% have deployed climate-risk analytics. At the same time, geopolitical and economic pressures are reshaping sustainability priorities: nearly two-thirds of executives say geopolitical disruption has changed how their organization approaches sustainability, while 71% say access to critical resources now influences decisions more than emissions-reduction targets.

This is changing how investors assess risk and opportunity. Traditional sustainability performance and climate commitments are no longer enough. Investors increasingly need to determine whether a company understands its financial exposure, can secure critical resources, protect its operations and supply chains, and allocate capital accordingly. Resilience is becoming a practical indicator of management quality, future cash flows and long-term value creation.

How should investors think about climate adaptation and physical climate risks when making investment decisions?

Physical climate risks are already affecting business performance.  Our research shows that 87% of companies have experienced climate-related supply-chain disruptions, while 61% of executives expect water scarcity to become a greater constraint on growth than energy availability over the next five years.

For investors, this requires a change in the unit of analysis. Physical risk is still often assessed asset by asset, borrower by borrower and hazard by hazard. But an asset cannot be resilient in isolation. A building designed to withstand extreme weather may still become unusable if the electricity grid fails, water access is disrupted, transport links are cut or public protection systems are overwhelmed. The weakest point may sit well beyond the asset itself.

Investors should therefore complement asset-level assessments with dependency mapping. They need to understand which power grid, water basin, transport network and public infrastructure each asset relies on, how resilient those systems are, and how disruption could translate into operational downtime, financial losses and asset impairment.

Companies are beginning to respond. Capgemini’s research finds that nearly half have upgraded physical infrastructure to withstand climate impacts, up from 38% in 2025. In addition, 68% are prioritizing climate adaptation and 76% expect adaptation spending to increase over the next 12 months. For investors, the key question is not only whether a company is investing in adaptation, but whether it understands and addresses the full network of dependencies on which its operations and value depend.

Capgemini highlights in its latest research that sustainability can deliver real business value. How can investors identify where sustainability is creating genuine value?

The business case for sustainability is increasingly clear. We found that almost seven in ten organizations now report a positive return on their sustainability investments.

The operational and commercial benefits are also becoming more tangible. Some 67% of organizations report lower operating costs, 64% say sustainability investments have increased sales, up significantly from 47% in 2025, and 68% have attracted new customers or strengthened customer retention.

For investors, the question is therefore no longer whether sustainability can create value, but how quickly and consistently companies can capture it. They should look for organizations that embed sustainability into core operations, product development and capital allocation, and combine it with broader priorities such as efficiency, resilience, innovation and growth. The strongest performers will be those that move beyond isolated initiatives, scale what works and make sustainability part of how the business competes and creates value.

What role does sustainability data play in helping investors make more informed decisions?

High-quality sustainability data is essential to better investment decisions, but the challenge is no longer simply a lack of climate data. It is the lack of a transversal infrastructure capable of connecting climate information with assets, operations and financial performance. The findings show that 76% of organizations struggle to access greenhouse-gas emissions data across their value chain, while only 28% have deployed climate-risk analytics.

Technology alone will not close this gap. Organizations also need an operating model in which sustainability, risk, finance and business teams work from a common view of exposure, vulnerability and financial impact. For investors, this means assessing not only the quality of a company’s data, but whether that data informs procurement, risk management, operational planning and capital allocation.

It also means looking beyond outcome resilience, whether a company or asset can continue to perform under climate stress, to capability resilience: its ability to test scenarios, update assumptions and adapt decisions quickly as conditions change. That is where sustainability data becomes more than a reporting input. It becomes a decision-making capability that helps investors quantify risk, identify vulnerabilities and allocate capital with greater confidence.

What needs to change to get more capital flowing towards climate solutions and projects that can deliver real-world impact?

Investors need confidence that projects can deliver measurable impact, withstand disruption and create business value. Capgemini Research Institute’s A World in Balance 2026: The Resilience Reset shows that this shift is underway, with 73% of executives now citing value creation as a key driver of sustainability investment.

The market does not suffer from a lack of awareness, but from an execution gap. A climate-risk report only matters if it changes a business decision, credit memo, insurance model, investment committee discussion or board capital plan. Closing that gap means moving resilience out of reporting and into portfolio steering.

It also requires a broader definition of resilience. Outcome resilience is the ability of an institution, asset or project to absorb a compound shock and continue to perform. Capability resilience is the combination of data, technology, governance and operating processes needed to test scenarios, challenge assumptions and adapt decisions quickly. Investors need evidence of both.

This requires transversal climate-risk orchestration, with sustainability, risk, finance, treasury, business, technology and data teams working from a common view of how climate impacts translate into operational and financial outcomes. The institutions that lead will be those that treat resilience as a day-to-day management discipline, converting climate intelligence into better capital allocation, stronger portfolios, more resilient clients and more disciplined infrastructure investment.

Learn more about the latest sustainability business trends in Capgemini Research Institute’s A world in balance 2026: The resilience reset: Click here