In an effort to survive in a world where climate mitigation is seen as expensive, dispensable, and politically toxic, large multi-national corporations have entered an era of adaptation-maxxing, branding their sustainability efforts with words like resilience and risk management, rather than as an attempt to pursue a social license to operate.

I consider this approach a straight-up moral failure.

Many of the world’s largest companies are micro-economies in their own right. Amazon’s annual revenue ($716 billion) overshoots the economic output of countries like Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. Alphabet’s $400 billion in annual revenue makes it a bigger player than Portugal, Finland, or Iran. With a $2.3 trillion market cap, SpaceX is sitting somewhere between Australia and Canada (though I’m not entirely convinced by the frequently invoked comparison of market cap to annual GDP). Regardless: these are not small fish.

Those who claim that responsibility for climate action rests with the public sector are evidently not operating in the global economy of 2026. Large multi-national corporations are so extensive, so entrenched, and so much more powerful than many of the countries negotiating climate action at the UN level. Setting aside the fact that organisations of such immense scale have an obvious social duty to do their part, the political influence of companies the size of countries is impossible to ignore.

This year, the trends infiltrating many of the latest corporate sustainability reports and fanfare are efficiency, resilience, infrastructure, and adapting to new challenges (principally, energy challenges). Previously, we might have thought of adaptation as mitigation’s less interesting, slightly unsexy cousin. Well, in 2026, adaptation has finally had its glow-up, and everybody wants a piece of it.

This is a problematic turn of events.

In a world where collective action, sacrifice, and bold leadership are necessary to bring the planet back into equilibrium, adaptation is the selfish option. That’s not to say it’s unnecessary — it’s the oxygen mask fitted first to oneself, if you’ll forgive the cliché — but the challenge with this analogy is that investing in adaptation does not, in the short-term, make you better placed or more motivated to invest in mitigation: if anything, it simply sucks up the limited oxygen available.

In embracing adaptation in favour of mitigation, companies are engaging in what I call vertical and horizontal responsibility-dumping. Vertical dumping, through time, places the responsibility for climate mitigation on the desks of those who will come later. Meanwhile, horizontal dumping disperses responsibility through space, making it the domain of another industry, the public sector, or, frequently, China. It is not just corporations that do this, but when any organisation declines to partake in climate mitigation, it is worth remembering that to do nothing is also a decision, and in this case it is a decision that implies that someone else will need to take responsibility.

Even those who baulk at the use of a word like ‘moral’ in a commercial setting (just like fishnet stockings, there is a time and a place for morals, but it is not the office!) and claim that ESG has always been about business risk must still comprehend that adaptation messaging rings hollow to all stakeholders but investors. Perhaps this is of no consequence if shareholders reign supreme, but it is more than likely that other stakeholders matter too. (Thus, a climate strategy that only addresses adaptation is its own business risk.)

Despite my belief in the entrenched and corrosive power of large multi-national corporations, I have not given up entirely on the power of social license. Even the most powerful of companies and the most entrenched of monopolies can topple if the tide of public opinion swells high enough.

In any corporate climate strategy, a mix of adaptation and mitigation is the sensible approach. But the fervour surrounding this new push for adaptation is short-sighted. If the buzz around adaptation is considered a victory — in that it reminds the men in suits that climate change is indeed here — it is a small and conflicting one.

The dark side of climate risk finally being ‘taken seriously’ through investment in adaptation is that it is being taken seriously only as a risk to individual property, not as a risk to global wellbeing. In making adaptation its poster child, climate action moves from collective action all the way back to the climate crisis’s capitalist and neoliberal origins.

Writing in More and More and More, his book about the lunacy of the ‘energy transition’ as a conecpt, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz notes: “Unlike ‘prevention’, which conjured up images of planning, centralization and inefficiency, adaptation corresponded perfectly to the prevailing neo-liberal ideology, that of flexible, rational and resilient individuals — the term is already omnipresent — modifying their behaviour rationally according to circumstances.”

For those in the business of communicating their company’s sustainability work, it’s worth remembering who benefits from adaptation. A message that is gung-ho on adaptation may leave little to be desired for non-investor audiences.

Those in the climate tech world will need to find the right balance between selling what’s (literally) hot right now — adaptation — and not selling out entirely to the cause. In the long term, mitigation will still matter; it may serve your company well to be one of the few that does not lose sight of this.

It is more than likely that the hype around adaptation and resilience represents a temporary response to a climate-hostile administration and an economy that feels squeezed and pessimistic. In a future economic and political climate, adaptation may once again become mitigation’s awkward cousin — he has to be there, but not as the centre of attention.

Until then, I see it as our duty to stay wise to the subtle (and overt) ways corporations use terms like adaptation to substitute for more important climate action. It is not adaptation itself that constitutes the moral failure, but adaptation by itself. In over-investing, physically and emotionally, in this new era of adaptation, we are fuelling the very tendencies — a blindness to all but the bottom line, protecting one’s own — that led to the climate crisis in the first place.

📚 Book: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

I actually try to think about weird and creepy people like Elon Musk as little as possible, but I found this book just as the trillion-dollar news broke, and I felt it important to get a slightly better grasp on what Musk wants and what his rise says about our current world. Truly, this book delivered the goods — it breaks down his very odd collection of worldviews and how he acquired them. These are the philosophies behind the companies he built and the way he built them, but much of Musk’s thinking has also shaped American and global politics in a huge way.

The guiding principle of Muskism can be summarised as: technology as sovereignty. That sounds like common sense today, in the middle of an international AI arms race, but few would look to Musk as the spearhead.

🎙️ Podcast: How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (ft. Cory Doctorow)

Again, another topic I’m really trying hard not to think about, but can’t seem to escape. I went for this podcast because of Cory Doctorow, and it did not disappoint. What did we do to deserve Doctorow? I can’t get enough. Highly recommend this podcast.

🎙️ Podcast: How Fossil Fuel Giants are Targeting Kids

Okay this one is Australia-specific but very short and absolutely worth a listen by all climate communicators, if only so that we stay wise to the sheer force that we’re up against. TLDR: Hollowed-out public schools in Australia (sound familiar?) are welcoming activities provided by fossil fuel giants. Think: drilling for oil using straws and chocolate milk. Fun! So now instead of just teaching my kids about strange men with candy, I’m also going to have to warn them against chocolate milk and Chevron-branded activity booklets. The list is growing.

🎙️ Podcast: I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel

Another one, I know! It’s been a real season of podcasts over here. Loved this conversation between Ezra and Gary Shteyngart — I’ve never heard a man in his fifties speak Gen Z so well. The guy is bursting with energy for life, vibing on a similar wavelength to Cory Doctorow — maybe that’s why I liked this conversation so much.