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Johannes Teyssen, chairman of Lufthansa’s supervisory board, used a Climate Week NYC appearance this week to argue that corporations need to trade rigid climate purity for pragmatism, warning that an all-or-nothing approach to sustainability targets is pushing companies to abandon their goals altogether.
“Humanity has no choice but to confront the climate crisis,” Teyssen said, but he framed the response less as a moral imperative than as, in his words, “a very important business strategy question” about how and when firms act.
Teyssen pointed to what he called the hottest August in recorded history as evidence the physical risks of climate change are no longer theoretical, citing disruptions including reduced hydroelectric output at the Hoover Dam, cooling-water constraints at French power plants, and low Danube water levels affecting transport and industry across Eastern Europe.
At the same time, he acknowledged that many companies have missed deadlines for setting science-based emissions targets, and that a growing number are quietly dropping their climate commitments rather than adjusting them. His argument, delivered as part of a Council on Sustainability Transformation white paper convened by ERM, was that rigid target-setting is partly to blame for that retreat.
The white paper lays out five recommendations for companies: treat sustainability as a cross-functional capability rather than a siloed department, reframe climate risk in financial terms executives already understand, prioritize investments that build resilience, spread accountability across business functions rather than concentrating it in a single team, and invest in the data and tools needed to track progress credibly.
Teyssen, who led German energy giant E.ON as chief executive from 2010 to 2021 before taking the Lufthansa chairman role, framed the shift as a matter of durability: targets that survive market and political pressure, he suggested, will do more for emissions reduction than ambitious pledges that quietly get shelved.
