I have been a member of The B Team since its inception in 2013, and what has kept me here is the belief that business leaders can and must push each other further. Peers hold each other to a higher standard. That is the power of this collective, and it is why I want to use this space to issue a challenge.

I have had a long relationship with the world of business. When I was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in the 1990s, the prevailing view in my office was straightforward: business was on the wrong side of human rights. And that was often true. But I never thought it was the whole story. In 1999, I stood beside UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as he launched the Global Compact for Business in Davos. That conviction led me to co-found the Institute for Human Rights and Business, and later the Centre for Sport and Human Rights. I've spent decades believing that when business genuinely takes responsibility for its impact on people, something powerful shifts. Not just for the people, but for the business itself.

That belief has been deepened by my work with the Self-Employed Women's Association of India (SEWA), the single largest Central Trade Union for women workers in the informal economy in India, with nearly 3.8 million members working as street vendors, small farmers, salt miners, and domestic workers. With no job security, no benefits, and heat getting worse every year, they built their own safety net – a parametric insurance climate fund. Women pay in small amounts — it is a trade union, not charity, so they’re contributing to their own protection — and when temperatures cross 42ºC, they receive automatic payments that let them stop working. In the first year of the pilot, 21,000 members across seven trades received coverage. Backed by the proximity and credibility of grassroots leaders, the program grew to more than 225,000 members by year three. 

Now here is where business comes in.

Many global supply chains depend on people who work in climate-exposed regions, where extreme heat makes work unsafe, prolonged exposure can lead to illness, and persistent rainfall and cyclones can destroy crops and interrupt incomes. Without proper protection mechanisms, workers will increasingly be forced out of sectors entirely, undermining the long-term resilience and continuity of supply chains. 

SEWA’s cotton farmers supply to a major global retailer. When that retailer understood that climate shocks were threatening that pipeline, something shifted. Working with Humanity Insured, the company began contributing to SEWA's mutual insurance fund. Not as philanthropy but as supply chain responsibility. The satellite technology now exists to trigger automatic payments when heat thresholds are crossed. The business case writes itself: you need your workers. You need your supply chain.

I was visiting SEWA in Gujarat with Project Dandelion recently, only a couple of months after my return, SEWA's leader Reema Nanavaty wrote to tell me that flooding had devastated the region. The heat, the failing monsoon, the flooding, the climate shocks are becoming intolerable, and they are falling hardest on the people who supply the goods the global economy depends on. And we see this all over the world. While we don’t yet know if the catastrophic flooding on August 26 in Nepal and Tibet was attributable to climate change we do know that The Himalayas – spanning Nepal, India, China, Bhutan and Pakistan – are warming twice as fast as the global average, putting the region at increased risk of avalanches, landslides and floods.

None of this is separate from the broader transformation I have long been pushing business to make. The overarching responsibility remains: every major corporation must commit, within a clear timeframe, to getting out of fossil fuels. We know the science. We have the tools. And we understand now, with painful clarity, that the cost of delay is not absorbed by balance sheets, it is absorbed by the most vulnerable people on earth, in the most vulnerable places. The women of SEWA are not responsible for the fossil fuel dependency that is destroying their livelihoods. But they are paying the price for it. That is a moral fact every business leader needs to sit with.

Here is what I am asking. If your company sources any material from people working in developing countries, commission a serious assessment of the climate shocks affecting your supply chain (not a box-ticking exercise, but a genuine reckoning with conditions on the ground). Consider what types of worker protection mechanisms need to be developed, capitalised and sustained as part of long-term supply chain resilience. This may include helping to establish or support locally managed protection funds, like SEWA, as well as insurance or reinsurance structures capable of delivering rapid payouts during extreme climate events. The insurance models exist. The technology exists. Humanity Insured and organizations like it are ready to help structure solutions.

Crucially, these mechanisms should be recognized as part of the real cost of production rather than as CSR, philanthropy or crisis response. Businesses already factor fluctuating costs, including energy, transport, compliance and other externalities into the pricing of products. Similarly, the protection of climate-exposed works should be factored into the real cost of production itself.

If the people at the end of your supply chain cannot work safely, you have both a responsibility and an interest in changing that. And use your voice: push your industry peers, your governments, and your investors to treat supply chain climate resilience as the material business risk it already is.

The impacts of climate change in developing countries are far worse, far more persistent, and far more unpredictable than most business leaders have yet confronted. It is time for that to change. Not as charity. As responsibility. And as strategy. 

Mary is former President of Ireland, a member of The Elders, a co-founder of Project Dandelion and a B Team Leader. Learn more about Mary.

"The Catalyst" is The B Team’s monthly newsletter which showcases ways in which leaders are advocating a better way of doing business. Subscribe to receive updates.