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Richard Clissold-Vasey 

Advisor on climate-integrated business planning and governance

Richard Clissold-Vasey helps 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. Richard's work identifies where the plan is exposed, which weaknesses matter, and what has to change in planning, investment and governance.

He is not a sustainability specialist looking for a route into the business plan. He is 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​.

  • Helps leadership teams test whether the assumptions behind the plan still hold.

  • Identifies where climate-related risks and opportunities need to be built into planning, investment and governance.

Start here

Find the weaknesses in the business plan before they become performance problems.

Find out more about   integrating climate into the planning, governance and decision-making systems that shape business performance.

Explore essays, practical thinking,  frameworks and diagnostic tools designed to help organisations assess and strengthen climate integration.

Go deeper into The Climate-Integrated Enterprise and Integrated Value Planning.

Background

Richard brings over 30 years of experience in business transformation, strategy execution and organisational change.

He has 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.

That experience now shapes his advisory work. Many organisations recognise climate, energy and resource pressures as material, but the pressures have not yet reached the numbers, the investment cases and the governance that determine what the business actually does. Richard helps leadership teams close that gap, starting with the business plan.

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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.

Richard also believes business has a serious role to play in responding to climate change and pressure on natural systems. In his 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.

This work is most relevant for

  • Strategy Directors

  • Chief Sustainability Officers and sustainability leaders

  • Business and transformation leaders responsible for planning, governance and enterprise change​

 

His work is particularly relevant for organisations that recognise climate, resource, regulatory or transition pressures are becoming material to business performance, but have not yet fully built those variables into how the organisation plans, decides, invests and delivers.

This often includes engagement with executive teams, COOs and Boards where climate integration requires changes to governance, investment decisions, operating models or enterprise prioritisation.

What Richard brings

Sustainability teams often understand the exposure. Strategy teams own the plan. Richard works 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 few 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. Richard's background is delivery, governance, portfolio leadership and assurance, so the output is never 'integrate climate into strategy' as an abstraction. It's naming the planning process, the investment case, the governance forum, the decision right or the performance rhythm that actually has to change.

He isn't a climate campaigner, a technical modeller or a reporting specialist. He's 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 he works

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 is exposed and what to fix first. From there, Richard helps leadership teams prioritise and implement changes to planning, governance and investment decisions. Integrated Value Planning is the method behind that deeper work.

 

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

Created by Richard Clissold-Vasey. Copyright © Net Zero Transformation Limited. All Rights Reserved

Net Zero Transformation Limited is a company registered in England and Wales

Company Number 16532811

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