North America -In the Eye of the Storm

As the East Coast grapples with the dire aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a new study by Munich Re reveals that weather-related extreme events have most affected North America in recent decades. Research by the German reinsurer of 30,000 records of natural catastrophes showed such disasters have risen five-fold in North America over the last 30 years. For me, the Munich Re report, “Severe weather in North America," simply becomes the most recent reminder that climate adaptation must be a corporate priority. The report notes that the five-fold increase in weather-related losses in North America the past three decades compares with an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe and 1.5 in South America.  It also explains:

Anthropogenic climate change is believed to contribute to this trend, though it influences various perils in different ways. Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events and, in the long run, most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.

Past exchanges on this blog have been about extreme heat and precipitation, but perhaps the most germane for the moment is our discussion about Corporate Learning from Past Disaster.

It’s too soon to tell if Sandy has had a disproportionate impact on the private sector, but it’s likely that flood damage will net out a major cost to New York City’s businesses, even as Mayor Bloomberg and city officials consider infrastructure improvements to shore up against future storms.

Businesses newly committed to climate adaptation will find resources from peers with their own plans. They also may find good tools from government-backed organizations that discuss what climate adaptation looks like and, importantly, how to create an institutional commitment to climate adaptation.

Two that I especially like are:

“Private Sector Engagement in Adaptation to Climate Change,” a new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

Making Cities Resilient:  My City is Getting Ready a guide for the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, which I tweaked for a corporate audience here.

It’s likely the storm will prod corporate risk managers and business-continuity planning managers to take stock and begin instituting telecommuting policies, diversifying their supplier chain to other geographies and advising the small businesses upon which they rely about how to develop a resiliency or adaptation plan.

As Hurricane Sandy galvanizes us to examine more closely our climate adaptations, I’m inspired that you, readers, are taking leadership.

Climate Change Communications

Here are some reflections on the current state of climate change communications from my participation in a September roundtable hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research with participation from McKinsey, SustainAbility, Cater Communications Climate Communication and Climate Nexus, among others: Cultural norms matter, may be playing a major role in how we act about climate.  Two channels exist for science communication – information driven and cultural driven. It turns out that in order to influence climate actors, addressing climate actions as a personal choice that others in our community are making works better than honing in on the science information.  Yale’s cultural cognition project is loaded with interesting research about this, including a paper on Why We are Poles Apart on Climate Change.  So

As a climate actor, I may be frustrated that scientific evidence does not equate to climate leadership.  But, as a communications professional, I appreciate that my clients may be more compelled to act by what their peers and competitors are doing than by evidence of the benefits of those action to their business.

Language matters in communicating about climate change. Communicating the Science of Climate Change offers some great suggestions about science communications that apply to other complex information, too:

• Start with what we know, rather than with what we don’t.
• Use language the public understands, not necessarily the language of a particular industry.
• Consider community, political and ideological frames for storytelling to inspire action. A local frame proves particularly helpful.  So the Colorado fires, Texas drought, and Illinois flooding all provide great entrepoints for helping people see that climate change is having an impact on THEM, not just on the earth

Earth the Operators Manual

Video matters, too, in relating and relaying what is sparking climate change.  On reflection, the most memorable part of the two day roundtable was an introduction to Earth the Operators Manual, and particularly its clever “How to Talk to An Ostrich” with tips on how to engage folks who stick their head in the sand about climate.  In the spot called: Who says CO2 heats things up?"  they note it was the US Air Force that studied CO2 most carefully: it's heat-trapping properties could interfere with heat-seeking missiles. This entire video effort inspires me to believe in the value of climate change communications as a means to cause climate action.

What do you think is the most effective climate change communication you’ve seen/heard recently?

Institutional investor vs. individual investor – who is the climate adaptation actor?

Calvert Investments, CERES and Oxfam have just released a splendid guide for companies and investors dealing with disclosure and management of climate impacts entitled “Physical Risks from Climate Change.” I had the pleasure of speaking recently on a panel with Matthew Alsted, Calvert’s vice president of Channel Marketing and Brand Strategy at the LOHAS Forum 2012. He noted that, 50 years ago, individual households owned an estimated two-thirds to three- quarters of publicly traded stocks (U.S.) whereas institutional investors held the balance. Today that ratio has flipped.  This shift is remarkable and reminds me how much we must rely on the good minds at places such as Fidelity and Vanguard (I invest in both mutual fund houses) to encourage corporations to make good climate adaptation decisions.

The guide includes sets of key questions for different sectors that should be required reading for fund managers. They, in particular, should study them since passing along risk decisions to companies isn’t sufficient anymore, in my opinion.  I believe mutual fund investors have an important role in magnifying the opportunities and minimizing the risks of climate change.  As they have with corporate-governance issues, such as favoring the splitting of the chairman and CEO roles, perhaps financial houses could serve as part of the market solution to climate change by expecting responsible climate-risk avoidance.

Why are investors important?  Because from their questioning and probing, they help make climate adaptation material to companies.  The CERES/Calvert/Oxfam report makes clear that information related to long-term climate risks aren’t mandatory disclosures since these long-term risks aren’t deemed material to investors interested in the short term.  Regrettably, as the Colorado fires illustrate, the increase in adverse climate impacts will have a material effect on companies’ assets and operations.

ISC Corporate Services  “Disclosing Climate Risks: How 100 Companies are Responding to New SEC Guidelines” indicates that investors concerned about physical climate risk have actively pursued disclosure from the companies in which they invest and are using tools that track and evaluate companies’ climate-risk disclosures.

That’s encouraging!  I’ll be looking for ways to help more companies do the same.

It’s Time for NATO to Look to the Future Climate

Soon after he became NATO Secretary General in December 2009, Anders Fogh Rasmussen summed up the military alliance’s approach to dealing with the security implications of climate change in three words: “consultation, adaptation, and operation.” Appearing on a panel at a United Nations’ conference on climate change, Rasmussen maintained that the organization has “a real edge” to help tackle any such challenges. Since then, Rasmussen and NATO ministers have shown general disinterest in the subject. His 2011 annual report didn’t mention climate at all. And a two-day NATO science workshop in late April last year on climate change drew mostly academics and little notice. During the upcoming summit in Chicago on May 20-21, NATO heads of state and government will discuss many issues, but climate isn’t expected to be one of them.

What an oversight. Especially since Rasmussen’s predecessor, in a June 2008 speech addressing the future of the Alliance, called on NATO to prepare for a period of global insecurity sparked by climate change. Frankly, it’s time for Rasmussen and the Alliance to take proactive steps toward preparation. That means preparing a new type of “army”—recruits who include climatologists, epidemiologists, geologists, agricultural scientists, foresters, hydrologists, and even cultural historians.

Why? Because climate change is real. Not-so-subtle changes already are afoot on our planet from climate shifts, including extreme natural storms and disasters, higher temperatures, and rising ocean levels. It’s just a matter of time before peoples start squabbling—and worse—over scarce water, food, or other vital resources triggered by mutable climate conditions.

It’s happened before. A largely agrarian period in Europe known as the Little Ice Age (1560-1660) sparked the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) among other armed conflicts.  Fought throughout Europe, it was the longest continuous war in modern history, and a recent study, led by geographer David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong, contends that climate change played a major role. Cooler periods in China and the resulting scarcity of resources over the past millennium are also closely linked with a higher frequency of wars, according to Chinese researchers.

Dr. Zhang believes extreme climate events—both hot and cold—could have a disastrous effect on the earth’s ecosystem and may trigger social, economic, and political upheaval—possibly even war. The U.S. National Intelligence Council even evaluated the topic in 2008. Recently, the Mother Nature Network identified seven places where climate change could trigger conflict: Southern Africa, Bangladesh, Western China, Kashmir, the Sahel region of Africa, Central Asia, and Lake Victoria in Africa.  And consider the Maldives, the Indian Ocean archipelago that is disappearing into the water as sea levels rise. Already, Maldives’ president says the government is putting aside income from the annual billion-dollar tourism trade to buy land elsewhere, should the worst happen.

Naysayers, of course, will scorn such talk, especially if they believe climate change is a myth. Still, it was retired U.S. military leaders who asserted in an April 2007 paper on North American climate change that global-warming water problems—either too little or too much—will make poor, unstable parts of the world even more prone to armed conflict, acts of terrorism, and the need for international intervention.

To be sure, the connection between warming and war is extremely complex. But it still might serve NATO well to step up its preparations for when sensitive situations—which may not be far away—arise from changes in climate. NATO offers solutions, and climate change doesn’t have one. It would seem to be a natural shift in NATO priorities as European military conflicts ease.

NATO can play an especially critical role in helping develop methods and tactics to adapt to changing climate conditions and mitigate future risks. The facts bear it out: Adaptive societies face fewer conflicts. So by assuming a much larger role now in preparing for climate change adaptation, NATO could serve to increase social, economic, and environmental resiliency and lessen the risk of conflict.

Are you taking note, Secretary General Rasmussen?

Green Buildings and Climate Adaptation

I’ve just discovered a nifty resource tailored to the corporate sector’s climate adaptation leadership, and I must share it.  It’s an appendix!  I’m all about capturing the information I need from a good executive summary, but anyone looking to  fashion a new building for their enterprise should take 20 minutes to skim Appendix C: Adaptation Strategies, within the report “Green Building and Climate Resilience,“ co-sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council.

The report itself deserves a small celebration. Perhaps we’re witnessing an enhanced universal understanding of climate adaptation’s importance when the nation’s premier sustainable-built environment guide takes the issue on.

The report doesn’t directly address if some geographies and land uses will prove inadequate sites for their current land use because of anticipated climate-change impacts. These influences could be sea-level rise; increased frequency and intensity of flooding; pronounced stress on freshwater sources; and elevated incidences of wildfires. But the report does offer excellent recommendations for climate adaptation in the built environment.  (It’s arguable, for instance, that parts of Florida shouldn’t be sites for more shoreline development and that the arid Southwest shouldn’t be considered for high-water intensity land uses.)

Here are just a few considerations to pique your interest, with text from the report itself:

Prevent Flame/Ember Entry:  Eliminating exposed vents, installing oversized vents with mesh screens and placing vents in locations away from other buildings or vegetation may help to prevent ignition or damage during a wildfire.

Elevated First Floor: If it is not possible to build outside of a flood plain or a storm surge zone, the first floor of the building should be elevated well above the projected base flood elevation or storm surge height.  Elevating the structure will help to prevent damage during a flood from inundation, high velocity water, erosion, sedimentation and flood-borne debris.  

High Efficiency Egress Lighting: Energy-efficient lighting, including fluorescent lighting and LED lighting, lasts longer in exist signage and requires less amp-hours to run from a battery in the event of a power outage.

Sewage Backflow Preventer: A sewage backflow preventer allows wastewater to flow out in one direction but restricts the flow from reversing back into a building.  Access to sewer pipe should be incorporated outside of the building to allow easier access for cleanout in the event of a backup.

Areas of Refuge: Areas of refuge typically are designed to respond only to fires, but as the risk of sever precipitation and flooding increases, areas on the upper floors of buildings may need to be designated as hardened areas to protect occupants until help arrives.

Granted, many of these recommendations rely on a new skill set for building-design professionals, especially project engineers.  For instance, rather than referring to a table defining 5, 10, 30 and 100-year storm events that reflect the analysis of historic weather events that the engineer hasn’t ever done, design professionals now will analyze downscaled climate data* and make their own assumptions about storm events’ impacts on the built form.  I’m confident were up to the challenge.

Framing Climate Adaptation Messages for Corporate Action

When addressing climate adaptation, it could prove advantageous to frame your messaging in ways other than strictly using climate change as the backdrop.  Recent studies show that framing such messaging under the clean energy or public health heading resonates well with most audiences. Opportunities certainly arise for using public health as the direction for addressing such issues as heat stress from increased urban heat-island effects, water-borne illnesses from flooding and the change of ranges for vector-borne disease as they relate to morbidity and mortality.

All of this leads to the real opportunities for messaging about climate: during and just after a local climate-related event.  When people view climate change as being harmful to their business, their community and their families, they are more likely to take action to adapt.  They work to “avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable,” asserts climate adaptation maven Rosina Bierbaum.

Speaking of mavens, those of us in the business of communicating should always remember Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” helpful categorizations of folks:

• Messengers, he maintains, are socially connected people
• Mavens are those offering new information or perspectives, and
• Salespeople are persuaders

For the corporate sector to be climate adaptive, we need all three types.

Is Climate Adaptation CSR?

Is Climate Adaptation CSR? “Private Sector Engagement in Adaptation to Climate Change,” a new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is a worthwhile read, especially for discovering solid examples of extractive industry, water utility and agricultural adaptation.  However, the report notes that adaptation “does not fit neatly within standard Corporate Social Responsibility narratives.” This is because a defining characteristic of adaptation is that its benefits are often local and private, whereas mitigating greenhouse gas emissions has global and public benefits.

I believe that climate adaptation fits squarely within CSR for at least three reasons.  They are:

Community: Climate change requires community resiliency, and corporations have an opportunity to both show a commitment to their communities and gain market share through their community-level response to climate change.  After Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005, the early-in companies that provided goods more efficiently than did FEMA exemplified this. Their reputations benefited.

Social: Climate adaptation can help ensure the health and well-being of employees, in preventing climate impacts as well as mitigating harm during and after climate events.  Helping to prepare your workforce, from your headquarters to the factory floor, safeguards the safety – and contentment – of your employees.

Governance: Climate adaptation involves a great deal of risk mitigation, for which investors are always on the lookout. Of course, risk management at many organizations isn’t (yet) called climate adaptation.

What’s clear is that, say, without utilities, with shuttered stores and with impacted supply chains, the public experiences the direct local and global impacts of major climate events.  Indeed, the global benefits of a private sector resilient to changes in climate are more direct and tangible than the global benefits of private-sector greenhouse gas reductions.

My bet is that a handful of leading 2012 CSR reports will include a chapter on climate adaptation.  Good for them.

Climate and Society - A Look Back at 2011

Happy Lunar New Year!  It’s 4710 on the lunar calendar and, having reflected on the myriad end-of-year/start-of-year lists in my inbox since December began, Jan. 23 seems a good day to reflect on the most thought-provoking events and items concerning corporate climate adaptation in 2011.  Here are my top three – plus a wish for 2012:

1. Studies show that one-in-five major civil conflicts since 1950 may be linked to climate extremes associated with El Nino. Those big climate disturbances rooted in the tropical Pacific Ocean remind us to prepare for the collateral dis-benefits possible from shifting conditions.
2. Japan’s multi-layered tragedy – the worst earthquake there on record followed by a meter-high tsunami and concluding with the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown – prompts us to consider the domino effects of extreme events. It also changes the parameters of corporate extreme-event scenario planning.
3. Reflecting rising temperatures between 1980 and 2008, farms around the planet produced 3.8 percent less corn and 5.5 percent less wheat than they could have, suggesting that climate change is having an impact faster than we are adapting.

Between 1980 and 2008, climbing global temperatures took millions of tons of wheat off the dinner table, scientists say. Some countries experienced big losses due to weather (red), while in others, wheat production held steady (blue). (Science/AAAS)

My wish for 2012:  That companies boldly embrace the opportunity that climate adaptation sparks – leveraging intellectual property to sell climate-proofed and climate-resistant products.  I’ve mentioned some winners in previous blogs.  Here’s another set:

• Construction equipment – for clearing debris and rebuilding weather-stricken communities
• Mold removal – for helping communities cope with basements swamped by overbank flooding or basement backups
• Power tools – for chopping up felled trees that fall victim to arbor pests that weaken them or intense storms
• Auxiliary-powered equipment- such as generators and transistor radios for use in power outages during extreme weather

And what are your wishes?

Ten Point Checklist for Making Corporations Resilient

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction has published an interesting guide:  Making Cities Resilient:  My City is Getting Ready. Its ten-point checklist for making cities resilient begs for a companion list.  I’ve added my two cents by developing a “Ten Point Checklist for Making Corporations Resilient.” http://www.unisdr.org/english/campaigns/campaign2010-2015/documents/campaign-kit.pdf

Ten-Point Checklist
	For Making Cities Resilient (UNISDR)	For Making Corporations Resilient
1	Put in place organization and coordination to understand and reduce disaster risk, based on participation of citizen groups and civil society. Build local alliances. Ensure that all departments understand their role regarding disaster risk reduction and preparedness.	Include climate adaptation in a member of the C-suite’s job description. Establish a cross-function climate adaptation working group and connections with local and regional governments in key geographies in your enterprise – especially operations and supply chain.  Consider collaborating with key members of your supply chain, industry peers and neighboring businesses on climate adaptation planning and execution. Ensure that all departments understand their role regarding disaster risk reduction and preparedness.
2	Assign a budget for disaster risk reduction and provide incentives for homeowners, low-income families, communities, businesses and the public sector to invest inreducing the risks they face.	Include budget lines for both proactive adaptation measures and recoup from extreme event.  Include climate adaptation in performance reviews for the C-suite, lieutenants and managers.
3	Maintain up-to-date data on hazards and vulnerabilities; prepare risk assessments; and use these as the basis for urban development plans and decisions. Ensure that this information and the plans for your city’s resilience are readily available to the public and fully discussed with them.	Include climate adaptation in your emergency preparedness and continuity plans initially, with annual updates.  Ensure that this information and the plans for your corporation’s resilience are readily available to your leadership team and fully discussed with them.
4	Invest in and maintain critical infrastructure that reduces risk, such as flooddrainage, adjusted where needed to cope with climate change.	Invest in and maintain critical infrastructure that reduces risk, such as flood drainage, snow removal, vector-borne disease prevention, and heat mitigation for workers and machinery, adjusted where needed to cope with climate change. Consider supply chain and building decisions with these risks in mind.
5	Assess the safety of all schools and health facilities and upgrade these asnecessary.	Assess the safety of all facilities, especially those in locations vulnerable to extreme weather events (coastal, arid) and upgrade or move.
6	Apply and enforce realistic, risk-compliant building regulations and land-use planning principles. Identify safe land for low-income citizens and develop upgrading of informal settlements, wherever feasible.	Engage with local governments to ensure that climate adaptation regulations protect residents and economic growth. Identify your most vulnerable employees (age, income, tasks, geography) and plan especially for their safety.
7	Ensure education programs and training on disaster risk reduction are in place in schools and local communities.	Ensure education programs and training on disaster risk reduction are in place throughout your enterprise, not just for disaster preparedness, but also for heat exhaustion, vector-borne disease, and the like.
8	Protect ecosystems and natural buffers to mitigate floods, storm surges and other hazards to which your city may be vulnerable. Adapt to climate change by building on effective risk-reduction practices.	Protect and enhance ecosystems and natural buffers in and near your holdings to mitigate floods, storm surges, extreme heat and other hazards.
9	Install early warning systems and emergency management capacities in your city and hold regular public preparedness drills.	Install early-warning systems and emergency-management capacities in your enterprise and hold regular preparedness drills.
10	After any disaster, ensure that the needs of survivors are placed at the center of reconstruction with support from them and their community organizations to design and help implement responses, including rebuilding homes and livelihoods.	After any disaster, ensure the needs of survivors are placed at the center of reconstruction.  See http://climateadaptationexchange.com/crisis-communications-are-you-ready-for-a-climate-related-crisis-in-your-business/ for communications guidelines.

Ports: Staying Competitive Through Climate Adaptation

Climate change will impact longstanding infrastructure, such as our ports. And since the vast majority of non-service-sector corporations rely on ports for some part of their supply chain, I encourage you to read Climate Risk and Business Ports, a framework for both evaluating and mitigating the risks of climate change on port operations. Its summary can help us find ways to evaluate risk. The report notes that climate change is likely to impact:

• Demand, trade levels and patterns affecting total trade through the port

• Navigation and berthing

• Goods handling

• Vehicle movements inside the port

• Goods storage

• Inland transport beyond the port

• Environmental performance

• Social performance

• Insurance

Suggested solutions include raising causeway road heights, paving unpaved surfaces, increasing bridge clearances, increasing culvert diameters, reconsidering road underpasses, improving drainage, managing refrigeration’s energy intensity, developing trade in climate-resilient commodities, protecting storage areas from flooding and adding additional insurance.

Generally, building to a higher standard is now a viable climate adaptation for long-life infrastructure. Ports that begin now to increase the reliability of their infrastructure can improve their economic performance and attractiveness to investors and users.

A UN Resource for the Private Sector:

If you haven’t yet checked it out, spend some time online with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Adaptation Private Sector Initiative. Most of the material deals with agriculture in emerging economies, and at least a dozen situations posted there deserve a look. The website comprises a treasure trove of case studies from a wide range of regions and sectors. Of course, many relate to agriculture, a UN focus. But you will find other items of interest as well.  I particularly enjoyed:

Tomorrow’s railway and climate adaptation

Hurricane Katrina: A climate wake-up call

Adaptation and the legal sector

If any of them inspire you to write a guest blog, let me know!

Sustainability Reporting and Adaptation

Sustainability Reporting and Adaptation As the Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR for short, reporting season concludes for many corporations—and the concept of integrated reporting – preparing one report that links fiscal and CSR data – gathers steam, the opportunities abound for companies to make their climate-adaptation efforts transparent to their shareholders, customers, employees and external stakeholders.  Stakeholders need to understand how a company is managing risks and exploiting new opportunities to make informed future decisions, and these reports are an organized mechanism to elucidate these plans.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), for instance, does a good job of pulling climate adaptation information out of companies, and the independent, not-for-profit organization has been mulling the issue since at least 2006 when it published the CDP 2006 UK Adaptation Report.  At least three industry-specific reports on building business resilience have followed since along with Carbon Disclosure Project Report 2008: FTSE 350, Building Business Resilience to Inevitable Climate Change.

The thousands of companies that report through CDP also respond to adaptation-specific questions, such as:

• Is your company exposed to physical risks from climate change? (2.1)
• Do physical changes triggered by climate change present opportunities for your company? (5.1)
  • Have you identified any climate change opportunities (current or future) with the potential to generate a substantive change in your business operations, revenue or expenditure? (6.1)

By contrast, the Global Reporting Initiative is much more subtle in its adaptation questions. Someone digging for adaptation references (like me!) can see climate adaptation in questions like:

EN6 – Initiatives to provide energy efficient or renewable energy-based products and services and reductions in energy requirements as a result of these initiatives.

EN10 – Percentage of total volume of water recycled and reused.

EN 14 -Strategies, current actions and future plans for managing impacts on biodiversity.

EN20 – Total environmental protection expenditures and investments by type.

And, as mentioned in a previous blog, Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) guidance asks companies to disclose climate risks and opportunities, which some companies interpret to mean more than risks and opportunities to a price on carbon.

What really proves inspiring are the corporations that  use these tools and others to change their own behavior.  A recent piece by Nike’s Hannah Jones, “Why Sustainability Reporting Is Revolutionary” is particularly compelling.  She suggests that climate challenges can impact corporate success (citing droughts and floods and their impact on commodity prices, for example).  To her, the investor’s question is: “Will you invest in the company that innovates, is resilient and anticipates changes in the market?”  In other words, investors are trying to identify corporate-climate adaptation leaders.    The best way to identify yourself as that leader is to start talking about your climate-adaptation efforts – through rich descriptions in your CDP and SEC reports and through climate-adaptation-specific explanations in your CSR and financial reports.  Leading companies will create best practices in this budding field.

Climate Adaptation: Your Examples

Climate Adaptation: Your Examples  

I’ve had dozens of lively conversations with my readers over the last month about what climate adaptation is.  I thought I’d share a quick list of examples to keep the conversation going.

Climate Adaptation is:

1. Planning a drug pipeline to include malaria prophylactics for the Southeastern U.S. (a global pharmaceutical company).
2. Installing on-site energy generation, including waste heat recovery, solar photovoltaic, wind) as a back up in the event of a power outage (a university hospital)
3. Budgeting to collaborate on port relocations as part of long term planning (an international shipping company).
4. Crafting new policies to prevent heat exhaustion, including on-site potable water access and shade provision (a Midwest construction firm).
5. Storing chlorine and fertilizer above ground, rather than in the sub-level parking garage (a parking lot owner).
6. Including a requirement in the employee handbook that everyone keep a sturdy pair of walking shoes at their desk (a service company headquartered in a NYC high rise).
7. Organizing the next fundraising campaign around natural disasters (a child’s health advocacy nonprofit).
8. Opting to develop a river view site, rather than a rivers-edge site (a Kentucky real estate developer).
9. Testing new variatals of drought-resistant wheat that require less consistent water (an agricultural research consultant).
10. Stocking snow-management equipment in Southern markets (a major hardware retailer).
11. Updating continuity of operations plan, on the 10year anniversary of September 11 (a major D.C. employer).
12. Ensuring that the protocol for accessing office files and emails from home is clear and well communicated (California retailer headquarters)

What’s your quick list?

Introducing Climate Adaptation Exchange!

Climate Adaptation Exchange is for people who understand climate change is already happening. It’s for those interested in what this means for the corporate sector and those considering what we can do to adapt to alterations in supply chains, buildings, infrastructure, markets and employees.

As noted in “Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change – America’s Climate Choices – 2010,” “Adaptation is an adjustment in natural or human systems to a new or changing environment that exploits beneficial opportunities or moderates negative ones.” This definition provides the first two of the three reasons I’m writing Climate Adaptation Exchange:

1. It will help companies exploit new business opportunities. 2. It will help companies to avoid negative impact. 3. It will help companies contribute to more resilient communities, so that climate threats will minimally damage social well-being, the economy and the environment.

Companies should engage in climate adaptation not only because money can be made, but because: 1. We’re missing out: if the corporate sector does not begin to engage, it risks being shut out of the climate-adaptation policy decisions emanating from federal, state and local governments. 2. We’re futurists: one big challenge with applying climate-adaptation thinking to any problem is that it’s based on a future we cannot predict. It’s no longer safe to assume the next 20 years are going to look like the past 20. Corporations get that. We’re good at creating opportunities for uncertain futures. 3. Our stakeholders are affected: whether you’re a B2B OR B2C firm, our stakeholders feel the impact of climate change, which will continue to influence their behavior and needs. We need to be ready to serve them - our bottom line depends on taking leadership here.

My blog will discuss questions such as: • What are “no regrets” corporate-climate adaptations? • How can we reap collateral benefits from climate mitigation to enhance climate adaptation? • How can we integrate climate scenarios into existing decision processes, including risk management, business continuity planning and new market realization? • What lessons can we glean from disaster mitigation for climate adaptation? • Can we turn climate-related crisis into opportunity? • What are the basic steps to executing climate-adaptation plans? • In the event of a climate-related crisis that affects your business, who serves as your spokesperson? • What are examples of leading-edge corporate climate adaptation?

Ultimately, I hope this blog helps you to ask and ponder the climate-adaptation question of your work and your teams. How will climate change impact this decision, and what should we do to adapt to exploit business opportunities, decrease risk and contribute to the community?