The Climate-Integrated Enterprise
Richard Clissold-Vasey
Advisor on climate-integrated business planning and governance
I help Strategy Directors and CSOs find the weaknesses in business plans before they become performance problems.
Most plans are built on assumptions about cost, demand, supply and investment returns. Climate impacts, energy volatility, regulation and supply-chain fragility are now moving those assumptions faster than most planning systems can process. My work identifies where the plan is exposed, which weaknesses matter, and what has to change in planning, investment and governance.
I'm not a sustainability specialist looking for a route into the business plan. I'm a transformation and strategy execution leader who understands how plans succeed or fail in delivery.
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30+ years leading business transformation, governance and strategy execution.
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Help leadership teams test whether the assumptions behind the plan still hold.
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Identify where climate-related risks and opportunities need to be built into planning, investment and governance.
Background
I bring over 30 years of experience in business transformation, strategy execution and organisational change.
I've led complex transformation, governance and operating model change across global and private equity-backed organisations, helping leadership teams improve execution, strengthen decision-making and translate strategic ambition into operational delivery.
These experiences now shape my advisory work. Many organisations recognise climate, energy and resource pressures as material, but the pressures haven't yet reached the numbers, the investment cases and the governance that determine what the business actually does. I help leadership teams close that gap, starting with the business plan.
Why this work matters
Climate, energy and resource pressures increasingly shape cost, margin, resilience, capital allocation and enterprise value. When they sit outside strategy and financial planning, decisions rest on incomplete assumptions. Investment cases get mispriced. Trade-offs are made too late. Opportunities to move earlier than competitors are missed.
The issue is not just climate risk. It is business plan weakness.
I also believe business has a serious role to play in responding to climate change and pressure on natural systems. In my experience the two cases point the same way: organisations that build these realities into their decisions make stronger plans and better investments, and reduce their exposure and impact as a result. So whilst I care about how businesses respond to climate change and pressure on natural systems. I also know that leaders have to make these decisions alongside demands on growth, margin, cash and delivery. My work is about helping them weigh those considerations together and agree a practical response.
This work is most relevant for
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Strategy Directors
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Chief Sustainability Officers and sustainability leaders
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Business and transformation leaders responsible for planning, governance and enterprise change
My work is particularly relevant for organisations that recognise climate, resource, regulatory or transition pressures are becoming material to business performance, but haven't yet fully built those variables into how the organisation plans, decides, invests and delivers.
This often means working directly with executive teams, COOs and Boards where climate integration
requires changes to governance, investment decisions, operating models or enterprise prioritisation.
Most often in FMCG, consumer goods, retail and asset-heavy manufacturing, where supply chains and capital plans carry the most exposure.
What I bring
Sustainability teams often understand the exposure. Strategy teams own the plan. I work at the join between them, translating carbon, energy, water, nature, regulation and supply-chain pressure into the language a business plan already runs on: cost, margin, capex, asset viability, resilience, supplier reliability and customer value.
That translation is only useful if it's disciplined. The value isn't producing another model. It's looking at a complicated situation and naming the weaknesses that actually matter - knowing what to ignore, what to challenge, what to escalate. A strategy director doesn't need an eighty-cell framework. They need someone who can say: these are the three assumptions I would not take to the board without further testing.
Insight is where most advisory work stops. My background is delivery, governance, portfolio leadership and assurance, so the output is never a simplistic 'integrate climate into strategy.' It's naming the planning process, the investment case, the governance forum, the decision right or the performance rhythm that actually has to change.
I'm not a climate activist, a single focus sustainability professional or a reporting specialist. I'm closer to a trusted thinking partner in the room, someone who helps a leadership team see weak assumptions, false confidence and missed opportunities before the next board meeting does it for them.
How I work
The entry point is the Business Plan Weakness Diagnostic, a short senior review of whether the assumptions behind the plan still hold. The output is a clear view of where the plan is robust, where it's exposed and what to fix first. From there, I help leadership teams prioritise and implement changes to planning, governance and investment decisions.
For more detail on the advisory approach, see the Advisory page.
Explore further
Testimonials
Richard is a superb change agent. Not only does he have the planning and organisational skills needed to deliver complex organisational and digital transformation programmes, but he role models the leadership skills, capabilities and values that ensure that people go with him.
Richard’s greatest strengths are in developing and activating strategy, leading transformation and driving behaviour change. He is highly skilled at breaking down complex challenges into practical steps and actions - he sees the bigger picture, but also grasps the detail. He does all this in a highly collaborative, motivating and engaging way.
An outstanding operational and business transformation leader.
DARREN BHATTACHARY, CEO THE SOCIAL AGENCY
A fantastic transformation partner for CEOs. Richard Clissold-Vasey is highly skilled at working with senior stakeholders across the organisation to define strategy and deliver complex, multi-stream programmes to generate better commercial outcomes.
EVE DIXON, GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION DIRECTOR, KANTAR