Environmental issues, including climate change, have soared to the top of the sociopolitical agenda in executive suites around the world, according to a new McKinsey Quarterly global survey on business and society.¹ Executives expect that the environment will attract more public and political attention and affect shareholder value far more than any other societal issue; almost nine out of ten respondents say that they themselves worry about global warming. By contrast, in a survey conducted in December 2005,² executives said that the most important sociopolitical issue was job losses from offshoring, with the environment and climate change in third place.

The respondents’ views about the ideal contract between business and society are remarkably stable. Eighty-four percent still agree that making broader contributions to the public good should accompany generating high returns to investors; only 16 percent believe that high returns to investors should be a corporation’s sole focus. A notable development: 88 percent of the executives based in China now endorse the “public-good” dimension, compared with 75 percent in the previous poll.

As for how companies deal with the sociopolitical issues they face, this survey suggests that they are getting a bit better at it. In 2005 we found a large gap between the tactics respondents said large corporations rely on the most, such as public relations and lobbying, and those they believed to be most effective, such as implementing policies on corporate-responsibility issues. In the current survey, respondents say that their companies are making greater use of the more effective tactics. Yet executives continue to see most sociopolitical issues as risks rather than opportunities, and only 14 percent say that companies in their industries do an “adequate” or “good” job of anticipating social pressures.