Paris Roundtable: "What do we need to drive adaptation in companies?"

Notes & Insights from a unique gathering:

Paris was holding its breath in the heat. Outside, the boulevards shimmered. Inside the Grand Boulevards Experimental, our venue on the Boulevard Poissonnière, a cool breeze moved through the room, and a glass of water with a slice of cucumber waited for each guest as they stepped in from the warm streets. It was a fitting setting for the question we had come to ask: what do we need to drive adaptation in companies?

The group was small by design, around a dozen people, and strikingly diverse. Investors and real estate, academia and entrepreneurs, consultants, insurers and the financial industry, alongside people who simply call themselves adaptation activists. Before anything else, we simply got to know one another, who is in the room and what each person carries. They connected quickly. One guest later called it the best facilitated networking they had been part of. Another said you could feel the connecting dots evolving in real time. There was a particular energy in the room, and we suspect it came from a shared sense that this topic is ready to move.

We run these evenings under the Chatham House rule. That matters, especially now. Adaptation is in a phase of shared development and common learning, and honest exchange needs a room where people can speak freely. So the stories below travel without the names of those who told them. The panel, announced in advance, we are happy to credit.

A short panel, then the room

Our first panelist, Aurélia Smotriez of CNP Assurances, has already driven adaptation forward inside two organizations, which gave her the vantage point to draw out broader best practices rather than a single case. She described her search for moving forward internally what she called the bug of resilience, the one that never quite goes away. She told the audience the answer is to put the topic on the table long enough to convince everyone, again and again, until adaptation is simply part of how the organization thinks. She noted that an external anchor had helped her internally. Once the French government wrote a plus four-degree scenario into its planning and developed a National Adaptation Plan, the abstract became more workable, something a company can actually design against.

Emmanuelle Serhrouchni of AXA Climate moved into the harder ground of steering and blind spots. Adaptation, she argued, is not only a technical exercise. It is first a question of value creation, and close behind it a question of governance. Who owns the risk? Until an organization can answer that clearly, adaptation struggles to become operational. The blind spot, she suggested, is often the quiet belief that a risk is already covered when it is not.

Olivier Muller of PwC picked up the operational thread and shared his own recipes, drawn from long years in sustainability and transformation consulting. For him, awareness and capability building come first, because they create the precondition for everything else. Only once people can see the risk and are equipped to handle it can an organization begin to do things differently, from how it plans and invests to how it decides. Awareness opens the door, capability lets you walk through it, and the operational change follows.

When we opened the floor, the room did the rest. Daniel Schmitz-Remberg, the moderator and founder of the Adaptation Exchange, took what was already there and gave it a sharper point, and there was a great deal to work with. A lively exchange formed around an old tension: story versus numbers. Some participants shared personal accounts of how they had won their leadership over to resilience, a human argument that lands where a spreadsheet cannot. Others made the case for the universal language of finance, pointing to measures such as EBITDA at risk that let adaptation compete on equal terms with every other call on the budget. The most useful answer, the room seemed to agree, refuses the either or. Other threads surfaced too: the importance of finding the right allies, and of creating a pull from the top, whether from local leadership or a distant mother company.

The speakers (from the right): Olivier Muller (PwC), Emmanuelle Serhrouchni (Axa Climate), Aurélia Smotriez (CNP Assurances), and moderator& host Daniel Schmitz-Remberg (Adaptation Exchange)

What took shape

By the end of the evening, something had taken shape. Between us, we had begun to answer the question we came with, and we did it with a simple structure that several of us recognized from our own work.

Above everything sits a perspective. Adaptation gains momentum when it carries both the weight of current climate relevance and the pull of a future worth acting for. A purely doom laden framing tends to paralyze, and a productive spirit needs somewhere to go. That means holding value creation and social justice in the same hand, and engaging the wider ecosystem instead of thinking in silos. The French have a word that captures the spirit of it, “habitabilité”, the conditions that make a place livable, close to what we might call livelihood, or to what we could try and translate as “inhabitability”

Underneath the perspective, three accelerators do the lifting. We took to calling them the triple A of adaptation, our Awesome Adaptation Accelerators, with a wink and a straight face at once.

Storytelling. The emotional, tailored, personal and business relevant narrative that makes the case land with real people.

Numbers. The business case, built to meet the internal standards by which a company already measures and evaluates any investment.

Governance. The internal set up that gives adaptation a home, together with the external politics and the balance of power among the stakeholders you need to bring along.

And beneath the pillars, a foundation of guiding principles, the questions we try to hold ourselves to whenever we work in adaptation. Simplify the message, then simplify it again. Think in a transformative way, staying open to where a resilience roadmap might genuinely lead, in true system thinking. Act with entrepreneurship, because this arena of risk and implication is genuinely new. And collaborate, always.

Until the next glass

The evening ended as it began, with drinks in hand and conversations that refused to stop. We left with a structure worth testing and a room full of people who plan to keep testing it together.

Which brings us back to how the evening started, with people simply getting to know one another. That was not a warm up, it was the point. Trust forms when you know who is in the room, and trust is what let this group speak openly and shape something real in a single evening.

That is what the Adaptation Exchange is for. Not only a neutral space, but a trusted environment where diverse experts listen, speak up, and share the strive to advance adaptation. Together.

The conversation continues. We will host more roundtables in Munich (21 July) and in Hamburg (3 September). On 14 and 15 October we will present the results of the Adaptation Exchange working groups at the Handelsblatt Corporate Climate Adaptation conference.