A fresh approach to climate change
Phil Sivell Consulting can help you find sustainable solutions for a changing climate.
Climate change will affect everyone, whether in their business or private lives, and that change is now inevitable. It is one of the greatest challenges and drivers for sustainable development. It will require you to adapt to changes in both average and extreme weather conditions. The scientific evidence leaves us no reasonable doubt. Do you know where you are vulnerable? Do you know what the opportunities and risks are for you? Have you got an action plan to increase your resilience?
Strategy Development
Every big organisation needs to have a common understanding of direction, priorities and purpose. Your staff and your customers need to appreciate what matters to your organisation, and why. The effects of climate change should be at the top of your agenda. It is such a complex issue....
Vulnerability and Risk
Extreme weather, presents different risks to different groups. Some of the effects are obvious, like the flooding in the summer of 2007, or the heatwave of 2006. Understanding your vulnerability to current extreme weather is the starting point to understanding how climate change will affect you in the future....
Climate Change Planning
Denbies Wine Estate is the largest vineyard in England. It is just one example of a business which is likely to benefit from climate change as hotter, sunnier weather helps to them to develop new products and even better vintages. Wineries like Denbies, and many other businesses....
Strategy Development
Every big organisation needs to have a common understanding of direction, priorities and purpose. Your staff and your customers need to appreciate what matters to your organisation, and why. The effects of climate change should be at the top of your agenda. It is such a complex issue that it is vital you have a strategic approach to develop your response.
Big organisations that trade across the world need to understand the risks they face in different markets. When it comes to climate change these vary considerably. There are physical risks from changing weather patterns; infrastructure and transport risks from insufficiently resilient systems as well reputational risks. All of which change over time and location. The only way to understand and address them is to develop a strategic approach.
For those in the public sector, there is the added dimension of the government’s reporting requirements arising from the National Indicators and from the Climate Change Act 2008. There is also the pressure coming from your communities who expect you to be responsible and prepared for whatever the weather throws at you and for you to respond quickly and fairly. In order for you to make your communities sustainable in response to climate change you need to know where and how they are vulnerable and how to make them more resilient – in other words you need to develop a strategic approach across all services that includes your delivery partners.
Vulnerability and Risk
Extreme weather, presents different risks to different groups. Some of the effects are obvious, like the flooding in the summer of 2007, or the heatwave of 2006. Understanding your vulnerability to current extreme weather is the starting point to understanding how climate change will affect you in the future.
Most of us know about the physical risks – most often the likelihood of being flooded. But there are other risks as well; contractual – what happens if you can’t fulfil a contract, because your, or your supplier’s factory has been flooded? reputational – run-off from your site floods a local school; financial – your bank decides that your site is at too great a risk to extreme weather to enable them to lend you money to expand?
It is important that you understand the risks you are exposed to. For most, these are to do with your market and with finance, and you rightly concentrate on these. But for many it is the risks that they don’t plan for that causes the really nasty shocks. You’re not in a floodplain, so there’s no risk of flooding, or is there? In a heatwave will you still be able to operate? Do you have heat sensitive processes? What about your staff? Did you know that as the temperature rises, productivity falls? Is your business resilient?
Do you understand where you are vulnerable to extreme weather, and do you know how that will change over the next few years? Do you know what you have to do to adapt?
Climate Change Planning
Denbies Wine Estate is the largest vineyard in England. It is just one example of a business which is likely to benefit from climate change as hotter, sunnier weather helps to them to develop new products and even better vintages.
Wineries like Denbies, and many other businesses need to plan over the long term. They cannot just think about next week, next month or even next year. They have to think years ahead. This is especially true if they are about to make major investment decisions, be that for new plant or even new premises.
In order to make those decisions, it is important to understand a lot of different factors, and one that it is all too easy to overlook is the effect of climate change. For example, if you are investing in new premises, do you know whether or not the road to and from it floods every time there’s a thunderstorm? If it does, how will your staff get to work, how will you ship out your products? If your business uses lots of water, will the decrease in summer rainfall mean that you can’t get the water you need? Are your operations resilient? These and many more are all questions that you need to be able to answer in order to plan for and adapt to the future. Do you know what questions to ask and do you know what the answers are?