For two decades, a quiet assumption has propped up corporate climate strategy: Eventually, extreme weather, wildfires and other disasters will get bad enough that corporate boards, political leaders and the rest of us snap to attention and finally take on the hard work of countering, and adapting to, the climate crisis.
Katharine Hayhoe wants that assumption retired.
The atmospheric scientist, Texas Tech professor and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy — and author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World — recently joined me and my “Two Steps Forward” podcast co-host, Solitaire Townsend, to talk about why hope beats doom as a communication strategy and what that means for companies watching their own climate commitments slip.
Her clearest example of the broken theory of change is Hayhoe’s home country (although she currently lives in Texas) of Canada. It endured its worst wildfire season on record in 2023, with parts of the country burning coast to coast. The conventional prediction: The federal election nine months later would be a climate election. Instead, voters elected Mark Carney, a former UN climate finance envoy, on a platform that included scrapping the consumer carbon tax.
People didn’t get more motivated to act. They felt overwhelmed and detached because a wildfire that size made the problem feel unsolvable at an individual level.
“The behavioral science is very clear that it’s not enough to make people act,” Hayhoe told us. Worry alone, without a sense that action matters, doesn’t move people — or companies.
The efficacy problem
That’s the piece Hayhoe thinks sustainability teams undervalue: efficacy (rather than urgency). She frames effective climate communication as connecting three things — head (what’s happening), heart (why it matters to what you already value) and hands (what you can actually do). Most corporate climate messaging, she argued, starts and stops at the head, piling on data that raises alarm without giving people — or companies — a next move that feels achievable.
That gap shows up at the top of organizations too. Hayhoe pointed to a version of corporate finger-pointing: The sustainability officer says she’d act, but the CEO won’t let her; the CEO says the board won’t allow it; the board says shareholders won’t stand for it. Meanwhile, the executives who deployed real capital and effort toward targets view those targets as failures when the numbers slip. That, Hayhoe said, is corroding the sense among business leaders that climate action is winnable at the exact moment they need t
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