Is Your Business Ready for Climate Disruption? Essential Steps to Ensure Resilience

Picture this: A severe storm causes power outages in one of your major delivery centres, halting operations. Your clients still expect you to meet deadlines, but your team is stuck, your systems are down, and the clock is ticking. How would your business respond? Can your processes keep running, or would your operations come to a standstill?

Climate disruptions like these are happening more frequently and with greater intensity. So the real question is: Is your company equipped to handle these challenges?

In our recent research, we explored how resilience strategies can be designed in data-scarce environments, with a focus on climate risks. What we found can be a game changer for private companies, as well. While our case study focused on the Ikel watershed in Moldova, the lessons we learned from building resilience in this complex environment are directly applicable to companies looking to protect their operations from the disruptive effects of climate change.

Here’s how the insights from this research can help your company not just survive, but thrive, in the face of climate uncertainty.

1. Involve Stakeholders at Every Level

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when developing resilience strategies is thinking too narrowly. It’s more than about operations or finances — climate resilience touches every part of your business. Involving key internal and external stakeholders—your employees, suppliers, customers, and even regulators—is crucial to understanding the full scope of vulnerabilities your company faces. Your frontline employees, local teams, and external partners can offer critical insights about risks that corporate leadership may overlook, such as region-specific threats to service delivery, infrastructure limitations, or supplier dependencies.

By using participatory processes, much like we did in our research, you can tap into the valuable knowledge each group has and develop a much more comprehensive resilience plan. For example, your local teams might know about regional vulnerabilities that aren’t obvious at headquarters, such as risks to water supply or energy shortages.

HOW TO APPLY THIS: Hold cross-functional workshops or brainstorming sessions to map out potential vulnerabilities in your service delivery chain. Engage everyone from field staff to senior management in identifying weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.

2. Simulate Scenarios Before They Become Real

Most companies wait for a crisis to occur before thinking about how to respond. But what if you could simulate disruptions—like extreme weather or infrastructure failures—before they happen? What if you could test your resilience strategies under different scenarios without suffering the real-world consequences?

In our study, we used system dynamics modeling to simulate how various climate scenarios would impact local water resources, agricultural yields, and biodiversity. In a corporate setting, this same approach can be applied to simulate how disruptions—such as extreme weather events, supply chain breakdowns, or regulatory changes—would affect operations, finances, or even customer satisfaction. Similar models could help you test how well your business would cope with a power outage, transportation shutdown, or a sudden surge in service demand due to an emergency.

The result? You can stress-test your strategies before investing heavily in them, ensuring they will deliver the resilience you need in a real crisis.

HOW TO APPLY THIS: Use scenario planning tools and simulation models to test your response to a range of possible climate disruptions. Stress-test your current resilience strategies and identify gaps before a real crisis occurs.

3. Think Holistically—Don’t Just Patch Problems

It’s tempting to focus on one area of your business when thinking about resilience, such as securing IT systems or backup generators, while ignoring other critical factors like workforce availability, client communication, or infrastructure vulnerabilities. In fact, this is common mistake businesses make. But true resilience comes from thinking holistically and ensuring all parts of your business can adapt together.

In our research, we found that policies focused on isolated issues often failed to build long-term resilience. For service delivery companies, this might mean that while you have great data backup systems, your field operations could grind to a halt due to transport disruptions. Or you may have great operational continuity, but lack a communications plan to manage customer expectations during a crisis.

HOW TO APPLY THIS: Make sure your resilience strategies address all parts of your service delivery process, from IT infrastructure and client management to workforce mobility and supplier dependencies.

4. Use Local Knowledge to Fill Data Gaps

In many parts of the world, reliable data is scarce—especially in emerging markets. In particular, when service delivery is spread across multiple locations, reliable data might not be readily available. But that doesn’t mean you have to operate blindly. Our research showed that involving local teams and stakeholders can provide invaluable insights.

In our case study, involving local stakeholders allowed us to fill in the gaps where hard data was missing. For a business, this means tapping into the knowledge of your teams on the ground. Involving regional offices or local suppliers can help identify vulnerabilities that broader models might overlook, like local water shortages, power reliability, transportation disruptions or workforce availability issues during extreme weather.

HOW TO APPLY THIS: Gather input from local branches or remote teams regularely and in a structured manner to stay updated on regional risks and vulnerabilities. Use this knowledge to build more localised resilience strategies.

5. Define metrics for resilience

How will you know if your resilience plan is working? One of the key takeaways from our research was the importance of setting clear metrics to track resilience—whether it’s financial stability, operational uptime, or resource conservation.

Our study shows that resilience metrics should be tied to clear, desired outcomes, such as , conserving or improving key variables like groundwater or crop yield in our case study. In a corporate setting, resilience metrics should be linked to core business objectives. 

For example, in a service delivery business, these metrics could also focus on anything from customer satisfaction during service disruptions to how quickly your team can recover from a power outage. For some other businesses, this could also mean setting targets like maintaining a certain level of inventory during a supply chain disruption, ensuring a specific recovery time for critical systems, or minimising carbon emissions as part of your broader climate strategy.

HOW TO APPLY THIS: Define clear metrics for your resilience goals, such as recovery times, operational continuity, or customer satisfaction during crises. Track these regularly to ensure continuous improvement and that the business is meeting the resilience targets.

6. Make Resilience-Building an Ongoing Process

Resilience is not a one-time fix. It’s a process of continuous learning, adaptation, and improvement. In our research, some of the initial strategies we tested didn’t lead to the desired outcomes. This emphasises the need for constant learning and adaptation in resilience-building strategies.

For your company, this means regularly revisiting and refining your business continuity plans, evaluating the effectiveness of your disaster recovery systems, and learning from past disruptions. Don’t wait for the next disaster to see if your plan works—test it now, and improve it based on new risks or feedback from past disruptions.

HOW TO APPLY THIS: Set up regular reviews of your resilience strategies. Incorporate feedback from past incidents and continuously improve your approach to ensure your company can bounce back from any disruption.

Ready to Build the Resilience of Your Company?

The truth is, the risks are real, but so are the opportunities. Companies that take climate resilience seriously will not only survive disruptions—they’ll lead the way in building trust and reliability in uncertain times.

Now’s the time to start asking tough questions about your company’s resilience. Are you ready for the next big disruption? Have you considered the full range of risks climate change could bring to your operations? Are your strategies strong enough to keep your business running smoothly in the face of adversity? More importantly, do you have the right processes in place to weather these storms?

I’ve spent years researching and designing resilience strategies for complex systems, and I’m here to help you apply these insights to your business. If you want to explore how your company can integrate climate considerations into your strategy and build lasting resilience, let’s talk.

Get in touch today to schedule a consultation. Let’s ensure your business is ready for whatever the future brings.