This week the U.N. court said countries must address the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change. It’s easy to see from weather events why this is more urgent than ever before. 2025 has seen wildfires in southern California and South Korea; flooding in Texas, Bolivia, and New South Wales; and heat waves in the US, Pakistan, India, and Europe including Finland, Spain, England, and Greece. Infrastructure itself has taken a toll due to heat. Concrete and asphalt react to heat by expanding and warping. For example, roads in Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wisconsin and Cape Girardeau, Missouri buckled. At the same time, federal agencies that organizations use for notification and response in the US such as NOAA and FEMA have experienced significant budget and staff cuts. This is in accordance with the Executive Order “Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness” that pushes resilience down to state and local levels. Taken as a whole, what does this mean? Your organization must be more resilient now more than ever.
While you can’t affect the weather, your organization can prepare to reduce this recipe for disaster’s effects on your organization. Waffle House, for example, is well known for its business continuity planning and execution. How do they do it? It’s a combination of planning, monitoring and tracking, reducing services when needed (such as limited menu and cash transactions only), and employee support. Additionally, they improve based on feedback and prior responses and work with their supply chain including local suppliers and authorities to minimize disruptions.
Be like the Waffle House and:
- Re-evaluate your climate risks. Although an emerging market, Forrester has been tracking climate risk analytics software for several years. Use this software to identify what climate risks your assets are most prone to in both the short- and long-term. This will not only prioritize what impacts to plan for, but also helps identify what risks are material. This is especially useful to comply with regulations that mandate this reporting such as the upcoming California SB 261, the Climate-Related Financial Risk Act, that will be in force January 1, 2026.
- Augment your weather feeds and get a map. NOAA and its National Weather Service are the data sources that most other weather intelligence uses. However, you can augment with weather feeds such as AccuWeather, Tomorrow.io or even from Mexico and Canada if the weather impacts are near boarders. Finally, make sure you have a dashboard that executives and heads of business can all see where assets (including personnel) are in relation to severe weather. This will mean you need to layer weather on top of a physical map of assets.
- Work with HR to ensure employee communication even when traveling. If you can notify groups of employees by location, even when traveling, then you’ve solved one of the trickier problems of weather-related events. Although some weather events will not invoke a business continuity or operational resilience plan, HR will appreciate the ability to have advanced warning and the ability to not only notify employees of severe weather but get responses back giving the all clear.
- Shore up core business continuity processes. If you haven’t already, document your critical services, identify the key risks to these services, identify how long they can be down, and develop plans including any possible workarounds. Then test the plans where these services are fragile to weather-related events. From the Forrester/Disaster Recovery Journal Q4 2024 Global Business Continuity Management Survey, nine percent of respondents said they didn’t ever run a tabletop exercise and 59% said they ran a tabletop exercise only once per year. What are the odds that this single test was a weather related one?
- Don’t forget your supply chain. The physical supply chain is especially prone to weather-related disasters. For example, Hurricane Helene disrupted the Spruce Pine mine in North Carolina where approx.. 70% of the global supply of high-quality quartz for semiconductor manufacturing is sourced. To prepare, boost your third-party risk management practice to identify your most important third-parties and come up with alternates or accept the risk.
Want to talk more about the intersection of sustainability and resilience? Schedule an inquiry/guidance session with me.
