Business4Climate (B4C) Report 2025: “How to Move Business for Ambitious Climate Action: The Future Role of Business Coalitions.”
Key information
Date: 11.2025
Location(s): Hamburg, Germany
Project description
Business coalitions are becoming indispensable in shaping the future of climate governance. Our new report shows how companies, through strategic collaboration and negotiation, can accelerate ambitious climate policy, even amid geopolitical fragmentation and ESG backlash.
Based on 27 expert interviews and a network analysis of major sustainability coalitions, we identify seven key findings that reveal both the opportunities and challenges for collective business action.
- 🎯Clear positioning on climate objectives can attract supportive members.
- 🤝Managing internal multi-stakeholder negotiations is crucial, as the member-base strongly influences actions and narratives of coalitions.
- 🌍Geographical fragmentation of climate policy is testing business coalitions’ ability to adapt their strategic focus, allocate resources and coordinate multi-stakeholder management.
- ⚙️Flexible and solution-oriented forms of (ad-hoc) collaboration create opportunities to solve sector-specific (and regional) challenges.
- 🔄Creating more options for agreement can improve coalitions’ role as intermediaries for diverse societal actors.
- 🚀Support in internal negotiations and scaling of innovation enhances coalitions’ transformative role for members
- 🛡️Business coalitions are challenged to balance shielding member interests and providing platforms for positive policy engagement
If you would like to discuss the findings or explore collaboration opportunities, please reach out to our colleague and project lead, Björn Knoop (bjoern.knoop@cemune.org).