The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) 2025 state of the climate report makes for sobering reading. The headline is clear: the past three years have been the warmest on record. As carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, the atmosphere is trapping more heat. Most of that energy is absorbed by the oceans (around 91%), pushing ocean heat content to record highs in 2025. The rest contributes to melting glaciers and ice sheets, driving a steady rise in global sea levels.

Climate change is no longer a distant problem. Treating it as a reporting exercise or a branding opportunity reflects a world of gradual and contained change. The WMO data describes something else entirely: compounding risks that are building on each other faster than most strategies are designed to absorb.

The question is no longer what’s happening. It is who you need in the room to respond to it. That’s a matter of hiring, leadership, and company direction. These choices will increasingly determine who adapts, and who doesn’t, as both climate and markets move into a more unstable phase.

What the WMO report actually tells us

The WMO State of the Global Climate 2025 report continues the same message as previous reports. The Earth is warming due to rising carbon dioxide levels (and other greenhouse gases), with potentially disastrous consequences for food security, health, and economic growth.

What is new in this report is how far along this trajectory we already are. The findings are stark:

• 2025 was the second or third warmest year on record (depending on the dataset). With 2023, 2024, and 2025, the three warmest years in 176 years of observational records.
• Global carbon dioxide levels reached 423.9 ppm, with the 2024–2025 increase among the fastest on record.
• Oceans are the primary heat sink. In 2025, ocean heat content reached its highest level since records began in 1960, exceeding the previous record set in 2024. Every year for the past nine years has set a new record.
• Sea levels continue to rise, rising almost 100mm since around 2000. 

It’s easy to read these as vague metrics, but if this were your company’s dashboard, showing accelerating risk across every core system, you wouldn’t wait. You would act immediately.

Climate is no longer a side issue. It’s starting to shape how everything operates

Organisations have started to address climate risk at a reporting and disclosure level. However,  it is important to also address the capability gap that will determine whether organisations can actually respond when disruption arrives. Awareness of the problem and the ability to act on it are not the same thing. 

What matters now is what you can actually do about it.

Capability risk is your organisation’s ability to respond to external pressure. In practice, that comes down to the people you have in place. It might be someone who can price climate exposure into a product or portfolio, or an operator who can redesign systems under real constraints.

For impact investors, this is about how climate risk plays out in a portfolio. For corporates and scale-ups, it’s operational: supply chains become less reliable, costs harder to predict. And for advisory firms, client expectations are shifting fast, with organisations needing guidance they don’t yet have in-house.

For non-profits and social enterprises, this becomes even more acute. They are often serving the communities most affected by climate disruption, while operating with less financial buffer to absorb it themselves. Recognising that instability is inevitable is one thing. Scaling programs, or simply maintaining them, in the middle of that instability is something else entirely.

Who do you want in the room?

You’re only as strong as your team. As the climate undermines operations, it’s the people around you who will keep things running smoothly.

What this requires looks different across functions:

• Senior leaders. Individuals with experience navigating uncertain and fast-changing situations are premium candidates. Optimisation is useful, but operational resilience under pressure matters more. Such individuals have developed the scar tissue and muscle memory to constantly problem solve and innovate
• Functional specialists. People who can model 'non financial' exposure into financial forecasts, redesign supply chains under disruption, or adjust delivery models when conditions stop behaving as expected.
• Advisors and hybrid thinkers. You need people to take a step back and understand the bigger picture. These professionals are systems-level thinkers, comfortable operating in ambiguity, often with cross-sector experience. They step in to advise leadership, reorienting a company towards a safer, more climate-resilient position.

Understanding the problem alone is not enough. Responding, planning ahead, and hiring people who can act as conditions shift in real time is what will determine outcomes.

For individuals, ask yourself: Do your current skills add value to organisations and anticipate the challenges that worsening climate change presents? Those who can maintain systems-level thinking while adapting quickly under pressure will find their skills increasingly in demand.