Why Companies Should Embrace Disruptive Climate Activism
According to the global MSCI index’s April report, most companies’ climate targets are inadequate responses to the climate emergency. The global transition to net zero carbon emissions is “unfolding in bursts,” and while more companies are voluntarily setting science-based climate targets and disclosing emissions, listed companies’ inadequate targets mean they will burn through their carbon budgets by July 2026.
According to an Oxfam study, these goals, which are already inadequate in themselves, are not based on implementable strategies. Resistance has even come from employees at the Science Based Targets initiative earlier this year when they wrote a letter protesting the intention to allow companies to count carbon credits toward net-zero targets. These targets often camouflage incremental responses to the climate crisis or unchanged climate-damaging “business as usual.” In other words: misguided transparency, but not the necessary transformation.
While on the one hand many companies are falling behind on their own climate goals or exaggerating progress, other companies like Unilever are dialing back on previously ambitious goals — with a host of conflicting responses from the market and investors alike. While some industry observers say that in Unilever’s case — with the support of investor Nelson Peltz — their new goals are far more realistic, others are worried that with climate leaders slowing down, chances of appropriate business leadership on climate are waning.
Weak progress and adherence to outdated, climate-damaging practices are the roots of the problem. In our work, we have examined how radical actors — mainly employees, peer businesses, and civil activists — are rising to remind businesses of their societal responsibilities, and we make a case for how companies can work with them, not against them.
Why the defensive stance?
Disruptive climate activism describes a variety of nonviolent practices aimed at counter-acting climate-damaging practices, including those of businesses. Activists may include internal and external actors. Most commonly these practices involve acts of civil disobedience such as blocking climate-wrecking operations, disrupting them through employee walkouts, or collectively refusing to work for certain clients. Disruptive climate activism may also involve direct protest action or whistleblowing to call out corporate climate inaction. Climate shareholder activism, climate litigation, and pro-climate sabotage are also on the rise.
A defensive stance against activism is second nature to many companies. But we believe the leaders of these companies can develop an entirely novel approach harnessing activism as a valuable resource for change. It starts with proactively engaging and collaborating with disruptive activists before, during, and after their actions instead of going straight to legal action. Doing so opens alternative influencing mechanism for climate activists that might be more desirable for both them and businesses. They can become creative allies of companies and be partners in advancing the uncomfortable, but urgently necessary, avenues for climate protection that do justice to the climate emergency.
Over the last year, companies have been actively piggy backing on the increasing governmental criminalization and marginalization of climate activism in order to subdue activists. In two recent examples, in July five “Just Stop Oil” activists protesting against new oil exploration in the UK received jail sentences of over four years for conspiracy to block a motorway and cause a public disruption. Just seven days later Lufthansa announced they would sue a handful of members of the activist group Last Generation for millions in damages for blocking runaways in another act of civil disobedience against climate damaging practices.
Companies are also using legal action to quell other types of climate action as well, including those that spring up internally. In spring 2024, ExxonMobil filed a court case against their own investors in response to activist investors demanding the corporation conduct Scope 3 greenhouse gas reporting, which would require the company to assume accountability for the emissions produced when customers burn fuels. ExxonMobil labeled the investors as “driven by an extreme agenda” and attempting to “micro-manage” the petroleum giant’s decisions.
Similarly, Amazon threatened climate activists (employees who spoke out publicly on the company’s environmental record) with legal consequences. Even after the company was accused of illegally firing two climate activists, with whom they later settled, internal climate protests took place again in 2023.
It’s particularly intriguing that both those who have long been labeled as climate villains — the petroleum, airline, and combustion car manufacturing industries, for instance — and those who were once highly praised as climate saviors like Tesla are all struggling with disruptive climate activism.
If there is one thing we have learned from disruptive historical social movements, it is that the severity of the initial resistance is often an indicator of the depth and necessity of the change initiated.
Promoting Disruptive Climate Activism
Measures that squash disruptive climate activism are also a missed opportunity for change. We see another way. Companies can find ways to engage this kind of activism as a source of their own transformation. We’ve observed the following practices by companies that have successfully achieved this integration provide inspiration for others to promote disruptive climate activism instead of simply criminalizing it:
Supporting external disruptive activism
The clothing brand Patagonia operates the digital platform Action Works, which supports climate protest groups on a large scale worldwide. For example, the brand sets up contact points for members of the Fridays for Future protests and has offered training on non-violent direct action in its flagship stores. When the company’s own employees get arrested for their peaceful activism, Patagonia’s policy is to pay their bail, court costs, and wages while away — not just for employees, but also their spouses.
Enabling internally disruptive activism
Despite, or perhaps because of, experiences with employees’ disruptive climate protests, Microsoft enabled an internal disruptive interest group for climate action that was led by a disruptive activist and punk musician. The group now has over 10,000 employees. Similarly, in 2023, the Berlin office of the Boston Consulting Group posted a job listing for a “Visiting Climate Activist” with a “real” interest in sustainability and experience in having founded their own activism initiatives. And companies are now hiring employees directly from activist organizations; for instance, KPMG recently hired a longtime Greenpeace activist as its head of climate and energy.
Competing to disrupt
The cell phone manufacturer Fairphone (of which one of the authors, Wernick, is a cofounder) started as a Dutch environmental activist group aiming to draw attention to the mining of conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — minerals that to this day are under scrutiny for being at the heart of brutal conflicts. Fairphone has now developed into a globally successful mobile communications competitor by competing with a radically more sustainable alternative to mainstream mobile phones. The company and its products were awarded a “Climate Solutions Award” by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Fairphone was also the first smartphone to be awarded the highly-selective “Blue Angel” sustainability certificate and the only phone to receive a 10/10 repairability score by global repair community iFixit.
Although these three practices are very different, they share a common principle: These companies embraced and intentionally promoted disruptive activism directed against climate-damaging practices instead of immediately reacting to squash these voices. Such examples show that acting together with disruptive activists instead of criminalizing them is not only possible, but desirable to get closer to disruptive solutions that actually meet the challenges posed by the climate crisis.
Promoting activism is existential and essential
Your organization likely already includes some activists. For example, one of us was surprised to find that there were members of the Last Generation, a grassroots German climate movement, not only among his students, but also among his colleagues. When the disruptive activists among us feel criminalized and marginalized, it is only natural that tactics shift from overt resistance to more covert disruption.
In the book Power, for All, Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro write that in order to develop solutions that go deep enough, we need three types of essential practices: agitation practices, innovation practices, and orchestration practices. Disruptive climate activists and practices such as non-violent civil disobedience are ideally suited to advance the first practice of agitation, which is usually lacking in companies — and a vital ingredient for any innovation. Corporate management, with its demonstrated strengths in supporting innovation and its implementation, benefits from a culture of dissent when it creates conditions for dissatisfaction to transform into innovative solutions. Climate activism alone and corporate management alone have not brought about change. However, together they are a promisingly potent mixture.
Support for activism is also essential considering the growing opposition and business innovations that address the failing core principles of neoliberal capitalist management principles. For example, Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing was aimed to disrupt practices at Facebook that she perceived to prioritize profit over people. In 2023, DWS Group, part of Deutsche Bank, made some headlines after its former sustainability director Desiree Fixler became a whistleblower to warn investors about misleading sustainability communications.
To that end, companies will need strategies for engaging with activism on issues far beyond the climate crisis. Already in 2019, the HSF Future of Work Report had “warned” of an unprecedented rise in activism among workers, which has led to the declaration of an era of employee activism. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, one can think of Amazon’s disruptive unionization activist Chris Smalls, the open letter against SpaceX’s back-to-work practices that led to the dismissal of disruptive internal activists, and the recent disruption at universities by students and professors alike who want their institutions to break ties with weapons manufacturers and Israeli companies using innovation for warfare.
. . .
We believe supporting activism and promoting its disruptive nature will be an essential core competency, even as we live and manage in an era of accelerating grand crises. We have seen proof of how disruptive activism can transform from a threat to corporate practices into a valuable source of securing one’s own future — disruptive climate activism as entrepreneurial future-proofing. It is fundamentally important not to jump to quell the disruptive nature of this activism, however uncomfortable it may be to leadership. Otherwise, we will fall back on practices and outcomes that fail to match the magnitude of the crises we face.
