Understanding Climate Resilience Is Requisite for Climate Competence

Underlying the growing pressures for climate-competent boards is this fundamental question: how resilient is the organization to the impacts of climate change?

Few organizations or boards are capable of answering this question with any degree of certainty. Yet, the question is being raised with greater frequency and urgency due to actions by investors, regulators, customers, supply-chain partners, and competitors.

Across every industry the increased focus on climate change is accelerating other megatrends such as disruptive technologies, digitization, urbanization, and evolving demographics. Underpinning these megatrends are a combination of technological leaps and upheavals in global society and the environment that will reshape economies, businesses, and lifestyles. For example, over $1 trillion worth of new markets for manufacturers are expected to develop over the next decade as industries transform. This shifting landscape creates many uncertainties, risks, and opportunities for new products, services, supply-chain structures, and improvements in resource management, among many others.

Taken as a whole, these pressures are driving companies to better assess, define, and enact strategies to increase their climate resilience. In their strategic oversight role, boards need better insights on the direct impacts of climate change on the organization as well as the indirect risks and opportunities associated with transitioning to a lower-carbon economy.

Yet, recent NACD corporate governance survey data suggests that many boards need a rethink on this issue. Six percent of respondents indicated that climate change would have the greatest impact on their businesses over the next year. The previous year’s report found that over 90 percent of public company directors believe that climate change would have negligible impact over the next five years.

Companies that focus primarily on climate change’s projected physical impacts expected to play out over the coming decades will have “blind spots” to the indirect risks associated with the transition to a lower-carbon economy. Companies must to go on the offensive to build climate resilience in order to gain competitive advantage.

Climate resilience has the capacity to adapt and succeed in the face of direct and indirect impacts of climate change. In addition to addressing and managing risks, it encompasses the ability to capitalize on the strategic opportunities presented by the shift to a lower-carbon and resource-constrained economy.

To provide boards with a line of sight into its organization’s climate resiliency, management teams can undertake one or more of the following actions:

• assess climate vulnerability of operations and facilities;
• embed climate impacts into enterprise risk management programs; or
• undertake scenario analysis to enhance decision making around risks and opportunities.

As a start, companies can model the risk of physical assets to identify location-level risk exposure and the vulnerability of properties and assets to evolving weather events and climate change. A geographic portfolio review can also help map demographic and infrastructure vulnerabilities to natural hazards to better understand how supply chains may be impacted by weather events.

Existing enterprise risk management (ERM) and risk assessment processes can be used to increase awareness of climate risks and better assess resilience across the organization. Leading organizations are using their ERM processes to identify how direct and indirect climate impacts—including regulatory and technology developments—serve to accelerate or otherwise change the velocity of other trends and risk events. Framing climate as a risk driver helps to align the timeframe of the risk and opportunity assessment to that of most corporate planning cycles.

Scenario analysis is recommended by the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures as a technique to assess climate impacts. Modeling different environmental scenarios (such as warming by a margin of 2 degrees Celsius and associated changes) gives form to the amorphous problem of climate change and provides mechanisms to discuss potential future states of operation. In selecting and devising scenarios, companies should consider the appropriate trade-offs in quantification, but also avoid excess complexity and optionality. When assessing for operational climate-risk resilience, it is critical to include a minimum of one favorable and unfavorable scenario respectively. This empowers organizations to make informed decisions regarding their longer-term strategies.

Overall, it is clear that the dialogue on climate change within boardrooms and among C-suites of companies across all sectors must evolve to a focus on how climate change will impact their businesses. The real measure of a climate-competent board is one that can address this critical question: how climate-resilient is the organization?

Lucy Nottingham is a director in Marsh & McLennan Companies’ Global Risk Center and leads research programs on governance and climate resilience. All thoughts expressed here are her own.