A lot of energy and money has been put into denying and ignoring environmental change, but industry is slowly changing this approach in a variety of ways. Corporate leaders have actively lobbied against the federal regulations needed to curb carbon emissions and transition to a carbon-free economy. Even now, companies are being shown to undervalue their financial risk in a climate-changed world.

At the same time, many companies have established and published goals related to reducing carbon emissions. Many are retooling, researching, or investing to bring products and processes into compliance with a low-carbon future.

One easy area to shift business-as-usual thinking, is for industry to leverage its own lands to help with climate mitigation, restoring lands to maximize their potential as carbon sinks and for adaptation, managing lands to enhance their resilience for both humans and nature.

In 2010, a partnership effort between Atlantic City Electric, New Jersey’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, and the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ found a way to use utility rights-of-way to help the eastern tiger salamander adapt to climate change.

Under ACE’s utility lines through Cape May, the partners worked to establish a succession of vernal pools, moving northward and away from the coast, to provide the salamanders with the habitat they needed to successfully reproduce and survive.

This example shows the potential of partnerships between company lands and conservation professionals to help species adapt to — and, hopefully, survive — a world transformed by climate change. And yet approaches like this have been consistently overlooked in the conversations about climate action. The result of the absence of nature-based solutions from the climate conversation is that corporate landowners lack guidance about how they can use their nonoperating lands for nature-based climate mitigation and adaptation.

Read the full article about corporate climate efforts by Margaret O'Gorman at GreenBiz.