Category: Resilience Science & Research

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. – Albert Einstein

How can we not marvel at a sunset, the blue of the ocean, a lush forest, a cherry blossom tree in spring, the majesty of the mountains, the birth of a baby calf, sunflowers turning toward the light, or the colours of a hummingbird? We sometimes overlook nature’s miracles. Preoccupied with our agendas, train schedules, phones, and sales targets, we forget how extraordinary this planet is.

Many astronauts describe the same realisation happening in reverse. Seeing Earth from space for the first time, they instantly grasp how small, fragile, and precious our planet is. Researchers call this the overview effect: a cognitive shock, a sudden clarity, that makes protecting this little blue dot feel urgent and obvious.

In 2017, a few days before the end of his six-month Proxima mission aboard the International Space Station, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet put it simply: “We need all this technology to get here and understand the simplicity of things: the Earth, the cosmos, life as a whole. It’s hard to understand borders, wars, and hatred.”

What if we paused to reflect on the relationship we cultivate with nature, not just as individuals, but as leaders? The resilient leader is aware of the world’s challenges and makes decisions with all stakeholders in mind: employees, customers, shareholders, and the environment. This guide is a state of play: a look at how to connect with nature personally, what the science says about the environmental crisis, and how leading companies are turning environmental responsibility into strategy.

What Is Nature, and Why Does Our Connection to It Matter?

Asking “what is nature?” isn’t a neutral question. The Western worldview typically separates human beings and human works from nature. In many indigenous cultures, this distinction barely exists. Plants, animals, and people belong to one interconnected sphere. This is a sharp departure from classical Judeo-Christian thought, in which humanity, created by God, sits above nature rather than within it.

Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’ reconnects with an older biblical message of respect for nature, built on a systemic view of the world that calls for rethinking the relationship between people, society, and the environment. Fittingly, the encyclical takes its inspiration from St. Francis of Assisi, long considered the patron saint of ecologists and a defender of animals.

Historians place a major turning point around the Neolithic Age, roughly 10,000 years ago, when humans began farming and settling permanently. Before that, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived by following herds and gathering food. Nomadism discouraged accumulating excess goods; portability mattered more than possession. It’s a reasonable assumption that early human societies lived in closer, more adaptive relationships with other species than we do now, a picture very far removed from a modern economy built on extraction and exploitation.

This broader definition of nature, everything that isn’t human or human-made, naturally includes our own inner nature too. And that inner relationship shapes the outer one. Cultivating a healthy relationship with yourself tends to promote a healthier relationship with the natural world, and vice versa: connecting with nature nurtures humility, responsibility, and gratitude.

walking in nature

It’s also measurably good for your health. A widely cited study of medical records from a 1970s Michigan penitentiary found that visual contact with nature alone produced a real effect: prisoners whose cells happened to face a natural landscape had a 24% lower risk of health problems than those facing a brick wall. Contemporary research confirms that contact with nature is necessary for mental health. In Japan, the practice of shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) is scientifically recognised for its therapeutic effects.

This pull toward nature has a name: biophilia, from the Greek bio (“life”) and philia (“love of”), describing humans’ visceral affinity for living things. Has modern life disconnected us from that instinct? It’s a highly plausible hypothesis.

Reflect on This

• When was the last time I marvelled at nature?
• What feelings dominate when I’m in nature?
• Are environmental issues part of my daily thinking as a leader?

Two Ways of Relating to Nature: Anthropocentrism and Biocentrism

When it comes to picturing humanity’s place in nature, two opposing views dominate.

Anthropocentrism puts humans at the centre of the world, separate from and above nature. Biocentrism is its mirror opposite: nature is sacred, every living being deserves equal respect, and humans hold no special place in the hierarchy of life. Taken to its extreme, biocentrism carries its own problems, just as an extreme anthropocentric worldview does.

French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin argues that both positions are, in a sense, forms of intellectual laziness that oversimplify a genuinely complex reality. His alternative is uniduality: holding implication and separation between humans and nature simultaneously. It’s a difficult mental exercise for a Western mind trained to think in binaries, and it echoes Taoism, the Chinese philosophical tradition built around the tao, a unifying principle, and the yin-yang balance of things that are at once distinct and connected.

Psychosociologist Nicole Huybens builds on Morin’s thinking to propose an ecocentric vision: a systemic approach where living and non-living elements interact to form a coherent whole. In this view, protecting biodiversity becomes essential, because losing even one species destabilises the entire ecosystem, and that instability eventually reaches us too. As Huybens puts it:

Contemplating the beauty of the world, thinking of it as a whole and harmonizing human behavior with the laws of nature are the pillars of the ecocentric vision.

A related idea, interdependence, sits at the heart of the Gaia theory, developed from the 1970s Gaia hypothesis proposed by climatologist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. The theory frames Earth as a self-regulating super-organism in which all living things cooperate to sustain the conditions for life. Global warming, in this framing, threatens the planet’s own capacity to regulate itself, with troubling implications for our species’ future.

Reflect on This

• Have I ever discussed environmental issues with my team?
• If not, what’s holding me back? If I have, how was it received?

The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: Facts and Figures

In the professional world, decisions are made on facts. So let’s look at the facts.

The scientific consensus leaves little room for doubt: global warming will have serious consequences. Since the 1950s, global exploitation of natural resources has accelerated at an alarming rate. Our production methods, lifestyles, and broader economic model have driven global warming, ocean acidification, and steep declines in biodiversity on both land and sea. Back in 2014, the IPCC identified greenhouse gas emissions from economic and population growth as the primary driver of these disruptions. A 2018 study published in Science concluded it is now 99.9% certain that humans are the primary cause of global warming. The IPCC’s August 2021 report confirmed it in blunter terms: “Human influence on global warming is unequivocal.”

Yet climate scepticism persists. A study surveying over 24,000 people across 30 countries found that 8% of the population doesn’t believe in global warming at all, and 23% doubt that human activity causes it. Averaged out, roughly 31% of people globally hold some form of climate scepticism, with the highest concentrations in the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Norway.

In 2015, the Paris Agreement formalised a global response. Signed by more than 195 countries at COP21, it commits signatories to keeping the global temperature rise below 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, with continued efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. That half a degree matters enormously: it significantly changes the number of climate refugees, heat-related deaths, disease risks, droughts, and extreme rainfall events the world will face.

To hit that target, CO2 emissions need to fall by 45% by 2030. The current trajectory points to more than 3°C of warming by 2100 instead. Governments are responding, unevenly. In September 2020, China’s President Xi Jinping committed to carbon neutrality by 2060. The UK, Japan, the United States (under President Biden), and the European Union have all pledged carbon neutrality by 2050.

In December 2019, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled the European Green Deal, an ambitious plan to decouple economic growth from resource exploitation. By July 2021, this included concrete legislative measures: phasing out gasoline-powered cars and introducing a kerosene tax on aviation. The goals: a 55% cut in greenhouse gases by 2030, and becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral continent by 2050.

If every current pledge is honoured, the Climate Action Tracker estimates global warming could be contained to around 2.1°C by the end of the century, close to, but still above, the Paris Agreement’s target.

The Greta Thunberg generation

In August 2018, a 15-year-old Swedish girl convinced her parents of the urgency of the climate emergency and sat outside her country’s parliament holding a sign that read school strike for climate. Greta Thunberg had no way of knowing the movement she’d started would go global. The Fridays for Future protests, organised by young people, quickly followed, drawing enormous media coverage.

Invited to address heads of state and international conferences, including the 2019 UN Climate Summit in New York, Thunberg has repeatedly held political leaders accountable for doing too little, too slowly. Her direct style, and her now-famous “How dare you?” speech, earned her both fierce criticism and fierce praise. Whatever your view of her methods, Thunberg catalysed an unprecedented wave of awareness and mobilised an entire generation, many of whom are today’s employees, and tomorrow’s leaders. TIME named her Person of the Year in 2019.

From Awareness to Responsibility: How Companies Are Responding

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to a company’s voluntary recognition of the economic, social, environmental, and ethical dimensions of its business. A company practising genuine CSR aims for a positive societal impact and environmental respect while remaining economically viable, a balance struck in partnership with employees, customers, suppliers, and shareholders.

This approach is becoming mandatory in some jurisdictions. France’s 2019 Pacte law established a legal baseline for integrating CSR into business conduct. In April 2021, the European Commission adopted the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), aiming to harmonise CSR reporting and extend it to more companies, supporting ESG-based (Environment, Social, Governance) investment decisions.

The old model of unlimited growth has ignored negative externalities for decades: pollution, soil depletion, deforestation. None of it shows up in conventional accounting. Oil’s market price reflects extraction costs, not the millions of years nature took to produce it. This is where the case for a regenerative economy grows stronger: an economic model inspired by living systems, built on collaboration rather than competition, favouring local economies, an economy of use, and circularity.

The scale of waste in the current system is striking. In Europe, cars sit parked and unused 92% of the time. 31% of food produced is wasted. Office space sits empty 35–50% of the time, even during working hours (pre-pandemic figures). The circular economy model, reduce, repair, reuse, redistribute, recycle, offers a direct answer. Movements like Circular Economy Switzerland bring private companies and policymakers together around this goal.

Businesses are stepping up. The UN-backed Race to Zero campaign scientifically tracks climate commitments from business, government, finance, and academia. The coalition now represents 708 cities, 23 regions, more than 2,000 companies, 127 major investors, and 571 academic institutions, together covering 25% of global CO2 emissions.

Some concrete examples:

• AXA, one of the world’s largest insurers, announced a climate strategy in 2019 aligned with the Paris Agreement, committing to direct financial flows toward investments with a warming potential below 1.5°C by 2050.
• Danone is targeting carbon neutrality by 2050 across its entire value chain, from farms to consumers, by cutting emissions, transforming agricultural practices, eliminating deforestation from its supply chain, and offsetting what remains.

In England, 75% of the population believes business bears responsibility for protecting the environment. The proposed Better Business Act could make the UK the first country to legally require companies to operate for the benefit of all stakeholders, not just shareholders, including the climate. Backed by more than 500 companies (The Body Shop, Waitrose, Innocent, Patagonia among them), the bill was initiated by B Lab UK.

As a leader, your everyday choices ripple outward:

“Your climate actions can inspire your team. By choosing to bike to the office instead of driving, by deciding to print only on recycled paper (or not at all), or by switching off air conditioning, you are raising awareness among your employees. When these actions are fully integrated into your strategy, you multiply the impact of your efforts.” — “Small streams make big rivers,” Ovid

Reflect on This

• What could I do to be a more environmentally committed leader?
• Do we have a CSR policy? Do we factor environmental impact into our choice of suppliers?

Considering Nature as a Stakeholder: The B Corp Movement

Since 2006, the B Corp movement has united companies pursuing what it calls the three Ps: people, planet, and profit. Certification requires passing a rigorous Benefit Impact Assessment (BIA), roughly 200 questions, validated by independent bodies, and remains valid for 36 months. B Corps aim to be the best for the world, not just the best in it.

Rose Marcario, former CEO of Patagonia, was an early pioneer of this movement. Joining in 2008, she overhauled the company’s production processes to eliminate waste and reduce packaging, driven by the belief that business carries responsibility to community and planet, not just shareholders. Certified B Corps sign a Declaration of Interdependence, committing to act responsibly toward all stakeholders and future generations. Becoming a B Corp requires amending company bylaws to legally balance profit and mission, a structure known as the Benefit Corporation in the US, the Società Benefit in Italy, and the Société à mission in France.

Nearly 4,000 companies across 74 countries hold B Corp certification today, most of them SMEs, alongside engaged multinationals. Danone has certified several of its entities. Ben & Jerry’s, a Unilever subsidiary, is also a B Corp. Swiss bank Lombard Odier, with 2,500 employees worldwide, has been B Corp certified since 2019, committing to sustainability criteria across its investments and transparent impact reporting.

Sceptical this is just greenwashing? The rigour of the BIA process, an independent, 200-question audit repeated every three years, argues otherwise.

Can Ecology and Profit Coexist?

Economy and ecology share a Greek root, oikos, meaning “the management of the home.” Reconciling the two is less a contradiction than a return to origins.

Bertrand Piccard was among the first to frame ecology through a profitability lens, convinced the climate crisis can be solved by scaling efficient, innovative technologies that convince governments and businesses to act. Through his Solar Impulse Foundation, a panel of independent experts has evaluated more than 1,000 clean, profitable solutions, from carbon footprint tracking software to reusable diaper washing systems to vertical farms. Compiled into an online guide available since April 2021, these verified solutions span every sector and are designed for large-scale deployment.The concrete examples and disruptive trends above generate collective awareness. This is the necessary step to accelerate the transition to a new economic model, integrating social and environmental impacts. The challenge for all of us is to take part in this transformation.

Becoming a Leader-Actor: Nature Stewardship in Practice

As humans, we have the extraordinary capacity to make conscious choices, and with that capacity comes responsibility, literally, our capacity to respond.

Whatever your sector or company size, from a small store to a multinational, you have a role to play in this fight. The time when a leader’s responsibility began and ended with maximising profit is over. The choice is simple: suffer the consequences, or act.

Environmental initiatives are already flourishing inside companies: carpooling schemes, buying local, cutting single-use plastics, adopting less polluting industrial processes. All useful. But today’s leaders are being called to go further, becoming advocates, influencers, and inspirers.

Concretely, that can mean:

• Lobbying for stronger legislation through trade associations or chambers of commerce, as seen with the UK’s Better Business Act.
• Using supply chain leverage to require suppliers to assess and improve their own climate impact.
• Communicating your environmental efforts openly, which inspires other leaders to follow.

“Courage is the first of the virtues because it makes all the others possible.” — Aristotle

Being a change leader takes courage. It’s not the easiest path, but it is the resilient one, the path that elevates and contributes to the common good.

Sharing this commitment with others who believe the same things helps sustain it. The Regenerative Alliance, launched in 2020, supports private and public sector leaders across industries as they transition toward a regenerative economy, building on peer-to-peer, expert-driven exchange and the collective intelligence of its members.

The transformation of the economic world is already underway, driven by leaders increasingly concerned about the planet’s future. Considering your relationship with the environment as a dynamic opportunity for mutual enrichment, rather than a constraint, gives your leadership role an entirely new scope. And suddenly, the question of what your work means touches something deeper than strategy.

Reflect on This

• When I make decisions in my daily work, do I consider their environmental impact?
• What eco-actions has my team put in place? Do we communicate our climate commitments, internally and externally?