HEATING UP: COMPANIES AND CLIMATE RESILIENCE
We live in a world that is constantly changing; a world many believe is more volatile, complex and unstable than ever before. To survive in such an environment, companies need to prioritise resilience.
Today, companies have to contend with all manner of threats – the ongoing economic effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, digital transformation, cyber attacks, natural disasters, climate change and geopolitical tensions among them – global challenges that are pushing their infrastructure and resilience thresholds to their absolute limits.
So, how should we define resilience in a corporate context? Climate resilience, as defined by Cervest, is “the degree to which a company’s assets are able to withstand and recover from extreme weather events and long-term shifts in weather patterns or seasons”.
More technically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate resilience as “the capacity of interconnected social, economic and ecological systems to cope with a hazardous event, trend or disturbance, responding or reorganising in ways that maintain their essential function, identity and structure”.
While some hazardous events may well be impermanent, the effects of climate change are almost certainly not. As an urgent threat demanding decisive action, climate change is increasingly causing severe weather events, which pose significant risk to the safety of employees, customers and physical assets, as well as threatening business continuity.
Underlining both the seriousness and pervasiveness of the risks climate change poses for companies is the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) ‘Global Risks Report 2023’, which states that climate-related risks are one of the top two most critical risks facing the global economy in the near and longer term.
Jul-Sep 2023 Issue
Fraser Tennant