Climate change is driving one of the biggest organisational transformations in business history. It will require new supply chain configurations, new business innovations, new energy sources and new financing structures. The changes will touch all businesses in some way.

Accordingly, it’s reasonable to expect management scholars to be part of the public discourse on climate change. Surprisingly, however, that is not the case. On 891 climate-related articles published from July 2024 to June 2025 in the New York Times, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, only 14 included contributions from business school faculty, our research has revealed.

What’s more, their insights were typically limited to business education trends or broad market risks – not the nuts and bolts of organisational change that climate transformation requires. Instead, most stories drew expertise from the usual suspects: climate scientists explaining extreme weather, economists analysing carbon markets and policymakers outlining regulations.

Yet there are plenty of areas in which we management scholars could make telling contributions. Consider the US Environmental Protection Agency’s  to rescind the 2009 “endangerment finding” that has enabled federal regulation of greenhouse gases. Media coverage typically frames this as either environmental catastrophe or regulatory relief but the proposal also poses a critical strategic question for companies across every sector: should they maintain voluntary climate commitments without regulatory backing or scale back efforts in an uncertain environment? And this decision involves classic organisational challenges: aligning incentive systems, managing stakeholder expectations and maintaining employee engagement around purpose-driven initiatives.

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The 14 articles that did feature business school voices reveal how narrow the scope of insights has been. Nearly half came from finance professors, such as and London Business School analysing sustainable fund performance. While important, these conversations focused on markets, not organisational transformation.

The single biggest cluster appeared in a about business education, where five professors and deans discussed growing student interest in sustainability and criticised business schools for being “very very late to address the world’s most urgent global crisis”. Although valuable, this metacommentary about academic institutions is more inward-looking than practical guidance for organisations.

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When management scholars did address implementation challenges, their insights remained high-level. Columbia’s why – citing political risk rather than internal organisational barriers. about corporate emissions commitments but coverage didn’t explore how companies are actually delivering on those pledges.

Perhaps most telling, not a single article featured management scholars discussing core organisational challenges: How do you redesign incentive systems to reward climate performance? What governance structures support long-term sustainability thinking? How do you overcome middle management resistance to operational changes? These are exactly the kinds of questions that management research has addressed in other contexts for decades.

So why aren’t management scholars consulted more by the mainstream media for their climate change coverage? It’s possible that academic language about “organisational capabilities” and “strategic alignment” doesn’t translate well to deadline-driven newsrooms. Many management scholars work on theoretical rather than practical problems, making it difficult for journalists to know who to call for real-world insights. And while management scholars might be able to explain why companies haven’t made net zero pledges, fewer can address why the pledges aren’t working or how to make them work better.

Equally, while journalists recognise the importance of climate science, policy debates and market impacts – because those are established beats with clear expert sources – they may not recognise management expertise as relevant to climate challenges.

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But the absence of management perspectives has real consequences. Recent surveying more than 1,400 companies across 51 countries found that just 41 per cent had climate risk management plans, and only 4 per cent disclosed their net zero spending. This troubling disconnect between public commitments and corporate follow-through represents exactly the kind of implementation challenge that management scholars study.

When business professors don’t participate – or participate only at the margins – in the public debate about climate change and business responsibility, the opportunity is missed to rethink growth models, redesign supply chains and experiment with governance systems that might align business with planetary boundaries.

Journalists need to recognise that organisational challenges can reveal more about adaptation to climate change than policy debates do. But management scholars also need to step up. They should position themselves as practical experts on corporate transformation during uncertain times, and they should be able to translate their research into the accessible insights that organisations trying to navigate complex change desperately need.

The climate challenge is too urgent, and the implementation gap too wide, to leave their expertise locked up in academic journals any longer.

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is professor and Canada research chair in business sustainability at Western University’s Ivey Business School. is research associate at Innovation North.