Adapting to Climate Change: Protecting Your People and Your Business

Almost daily, the Weather Network shares an alert of some sort. Whether it’s extreme heat or cold, severe storms, high winds, or worse, there is usually an event occurring in some corner of the country, and, too often, in multiple locations.

These events are becoming more common and more damaging – in visible and not so visible ways to communities, homeowners and business owners. We regularly see photos and footage of the physical destruction. What we don’t see though, are the not so visible but significant ways climate change is affecting the cost of doing business in Canada.

BDC’s report, Fire Floods and Heatwaves: Are Canada’s Small Businesses Ready, lists many of these, including:

• • Increased temperatures affecting human health due to heat stress

  • Incidents of drought affecting forests and agriculture

  • More pests affecting crops and forests

  • Lower lake levels affecting shipping

  • Hydropower production and recreation, extreme winds affecting agriculture, infrastructure

  • Extreme weather events preventing other forms of shipping and transportation

 [Read: 5 Ways to Prevent Heat Stress]

And then there are the many impacts to employee health and safety. The CCOHS Climate Change: Workplace Impacts Handbook identifies physical and psychological health and safety impacts, including, but not limited to:

• • Greater exposure to extreme weather, air pollution, and disease

  • Many hazards related to cleaning up after severe weather events

  • Job insecurity or excessive working hours

  • Exposure to traumatic events

  • Scarcity of resources

  • Increase in violence and disputes in extreme conditions

  • Stress and strained relationships

  • Eco-anxiety

[See: Climate Changes: Workplace Impacts eCourse]

Despite this, few organizations are taking action to adapt and build business plans that reflect this new reality. In 2024, 74% of small businesses suffered revenue loss and 50% said their operating costs went up. Just over 30% faced supply chain or water access issues and nearly 40% had insurance issues.

Start building resilience by asking critical questions

Two years ago, KPMG surveyed over 350 business leaders about climate change. At that time, over 90% said they feared it was the new norm and expected they would be hit by a climate- related event that year. They urge organizations to take a holistic and customized approach to understand risks, impacts and possible solutions to minimize exposure and build resilience, starting by considering these questions:

• • How are you comprehensively assessing your climate risks, including the social risks, to understand potential impacts on your operations and financial performance?

  • Have you considered the impacts of climate change on all your key stakeholders, including your workforce, supply chain, customer base, and broader community?

  • What social considerations are you factoring in while building your climate resilience plan? (e.g., social equity frameworks and impact assessment tools, co-design principles, community capacity-building frameworks, accountability structures, etc.)

  • How are you building trust with communities and stakeholders most impacted by climate disasters to facilitate communication and the co-design of solutions?

Manage threats and build resilience with climate adaptation

The BDC report outlines the differences between climate mitigation, which is longer-term and focused on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and climate adaptation. Adaptation involves adjusting behaviours, systems and practices to reduce the costs associated with climate impacts. The report notes, “Adaptation helps us manage immediate threats while building long-term resilience against future ones.”

Earlier this year, the ISO/PAS 45007 standard was released, which provides guidance to organizations of all sizes on planning for and addressing occupational health and safety risks arising from climate change and climate change action, including risks related to changing ways of working, work processes, infrastructure upgrades, and climate change mitigation actions.

A recent article published in OHS provides practical tips to help you adapt your health and safety plan and embed the standard into existing systems. It suggests that you do not need a new program, but a “system enhancement sharpening the lens of your existing system in the workplace.”

The article recommends that business owners and leaders assess policies and programs to ensure they answer three critical questions:

1. 1.   Have we explicitly identified climate-related hazards relevant to our operations?

   2.   Have we examined how these hazards affect different worker groups?

   3.   Have we documented these realities in our context section?

Additional tips include adding vulnerability to existing hazard assessment templates, considering new hazards caused by climate change, adjusting control measures to reflect climate stress, and monitoring and measuring as you would any effective health and safety program.

The frequency and severity of extreme weather events, operational disruptions and workforce impacts are becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to ignore.

Adapting existing systems, policies and procedures and building climate resilience into business, operational and health and safety planning now can help you reduce risk, strengthen continuity and better support employees through growing uncertainty.

Get to know the authors – Fresh Communications