Prince Charles urged corporations to do more to tackle climate change yesterday, telling a summit of top corporate lawyers that we have reached the "final call" on averting catastrophic climate change. 

The Prince of Wales said big business needs to do "a great deal more" to tackle "a number of truly terrifying and interconnected threats."

He was speaking in London to the Association of Corporate Counsel, a professional body of corporate lawyers, on behalf of his non-profit Accounting for Sustainability project.

"We are engineering the rapid destruction of the natural world around us, on which we depend for our ultimate survival, along with many of the species with which we share this planet," he told the audience.

"It does not need to be a choice between being profitable on the one hand, and doing the right thing on the other. Both are achievable."

Referencing the IPCC study on the impacts of global warming of 1.5C above pre- industrial levels, he said: "The report makes it clear we face a number of truly terrifying and interconnected threats, unless we take really urgent action to limit global temperature rise to 1C or less, since even restraining it to 1.5C will have catastrophic effects."

The Prince has long been a passionate advocate of climate action. In November 2015, he addressed the opening session of the UN climate change conference that birthed the Paris Agreement saying: "Your deliberations will decide the fate not only of those alive today but also of generations yet unborn."

In March this year, he praised the activism of children "crying out for concerted action rather than just empty words," in what many read as an oblique statement of support for the school climate strikes.

His speech yesterday was a direct call for action from business leaders. "Ladies and gentlemen, I feel you really have no excuse not to act on global warming and climate change; the greatest threat multiplier of all," he concluded.