The World Climate Summit, which ran alongside the recent COP28 event in Dubai, provided an opportunity to focus on climate solutions, technology, and policy. There has never been a more critical time to address the impact of climate change on our planet and the increasingly extreme weather events that are devastating communities and businesses. Climate adaptation strategies are now a requirement to effectively tackle climate change.
The World Climate Foundation, which organized the Summit, brought together global leaders, policymakers, industry experts, and business leaders to work towards sustainable solutions. Being in a position to contribute to discussions on climate resilience, adaptation, and emergency response allows companies to ensure that efforts align with the latest environmental goals.
Make no mistake. Extreme weather events, wildfires, floods, and the broader impacts of climate change are already posing a significant threat to public safety, infrastructure, and business continuity.
Planning ahead to mitigate risk is essential
As climate change accelerates, governments and enterprises must adapt to a new reality of increased risk. Governments are now globally investing in proactive measures such as early warning or alerting systems. In the meantime, enterprises are developing ESG strategies that mitigate their impact on the climate, help them comply with new regulations including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in Europe, and to create plans to address climate-related events for their business operations.
The benefits of a population alerting platform cannot be underestimated. It provides real-time situational awareness, efficient communication, and response coordination during emergencies, including climate-related incidents. This empowers governments, from the United Kingdom to Trinidad and Tobago, to protect their citizens and manage resources more effectively.
Our own system was deployed in the State of Maharashtra in India following devastating floods in 2021. It brought stakeholders and emergency services together with public works and health departments under one platform to provide a common operating picture in the event of a disaster. This unified approach means that the State can now put emergency plans into action, track activities, mobilise resources, and gain support for decisions in real-time in a crisis.
In the corporate world, the onus is on companies to demonstrate their ESG and climate adaptation policies to customers. Unless they can prepare, assess, and respond in an emergency situation, they will find themselves impacted by significant operational disruptions. The key is to have access to data and communication tools that allow them to make informed decisions, protect their employees, safeguard their operations, and minimize risk.
Critical event management solutions can be tailored to address climate-related events using real-time monitoring, incident communication, IoT integration, and data analytics. Increasingly these tools are being utilized by insurance companies for whom understanding the extent of climate related risks is essential. The insight is garnered from thousands of trustworthy external data sources, including weather patterns and environmental conditions and machine learning and AI are applied to deliver timely, accurate, actionable intelligence.
Just as governments and enterprises are evolving to meet the climate change challenges, companies like ours must continually innovate and expand our solutions. This means investing in AI, and partnering with state agencies, NGOs, academia, industry partners and many different climate stakeholders. Because of the unique capabilities we deliver to make organizations resilient, we foresee a future where our platform has a key role to play in allowing governments and enterprises to adapt to, and mitigate, the impact of climate-related emergency events.
In summary
Even with a concerted effort and focus on climate mitigation, no single organization or indeed government can remedy the climate crisis alone. Instead, we need to invest in creating a society that is more climate resilient. It is this requirement that became one of the principles for global cooperation at the last Annual Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Marrakech, Morocco in October: ‘Building resilience to shocks by investing in disaster reduction, climate adaptation and preparedness… Coordinating global efforts to address crises, including pandemics, conflicts and natural disasters, with a focus on vulnerable populations’.
All companies and governments should have a solid commitment to supporting climate adaptation efforts, and an awareness of how the increased number of extreme weather events is affecting their ability to keep people safe and their operations running. Technology is there to support them, both in the public and private sector, in reducing their impact on the environment by elevating their ability to plan for, and respond to, critical weather events.
The author
Lorenzo Marchetti is Public Affairs Manager, Everbridge
