Business action on climate change refers to the strategies, commitments, and activities undertaken by companies to address the causes and consequences of global climate change. Since the early 2000s, businesses have played a dual role: influencing climate policy through lobbying and advocacy, while also investing in mitigation and adaptation measures such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and low‑carbon technologies. Large multinational corporations, industry associations, and financial institutions have been particularly active, shaping both regulatory debates and market responses. Business engagement has included both support for and resistance to climate regulation, reflecting diverse interests across sectors and regions. Increasingly, firms also frame climate action as a matter of risk management, competitiveness, and corporate responsibility, aligning with broader trends in sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices.

Physical risks of climate change top the list of business concerns for US and EU firms.

In 1989 in the US, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. In 1997, when the US Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the industry funded a $13 million industry advertising blitz in the run-up to the vote.

In 1998 The New York Times published an American Petroleum Institute (API) memo outlining a strategy aiming to make "recognition of uncertainty ... part of the 'conventional wisdom.'" The memo has been compared to a late 1960s memo by tobacco company Brown and Williamson, which observed: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Those involved in the memo included Jeffrey Salmon, then executive director of the George C. Marshall Institute, Steven Milloy, a prominent denialist commentator, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell. In June 2005 a former API lawyer, Philip Cooney, resigned his White House post after accusations of politically motivated tampering with scientific reports.

In 2002, in the wake of both declining membership and President Bush's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, the GCC announced that it would "deactivate" itself.

Ex-World Bank economist Herman Daly suggests that neoliberalism and globalisation bring about "a permanent international standard-lowering competition to attract capital". If accurate, this contemporary economic environment therefore also aids businesses who are hostile to action against climate change. They are able to relocate their activities to states which have less climate based regulations.

At the same time, since 1989 many previously denialist petroleum and automobile industry corporations have changed their position as the political and scientific consensus has grown, with the creation of the Kyoto Protocol and the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Second and Third Assessment Reports. These corporations include major petroleum companies like Shell, Texaco and BP, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors and Mercedes-Benz Group. Some of these have joined with the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (formerly the Pew Center on Global Climate Change), a non-profit organization aiming to support efforts to address global climate change.

Since 2000, the Carbon Disclosure Project has been working with major corporations and investors to disclose the emissions of the largest companies. By 2007, the CDP published the emissions data for 2400 of the largest corporations in the world, and represented major institutional investors with $41 trillion combined assets under management. The pressure from these investors had had some success in working with companies to reduce emissions.