One week to register: How to turn climate risk insights into adaptation action
Climate reporting can tell you where your operations face flooding, heat stress, or supply-chain disruption. However, disclosure alone does not prevent those events from affecting your facilities, logistics, or revenue. A forthcoming edie masterclass, delivered in partnership with SmartResilience, will examine how companies can convert physical-risk assessments into prioritised investments and practical adaptation measures.
The 45-minute session takes place on Thursday, 19 November 2026 at 1:00 p.m. UK time. It will be followed by a 15-minute audience Q&A. Joanna Gluzman-Laukkanen, Sustainability Board Advisor at SmartResilience, and Harish Pesala, CEO of SmartResilience, will present the session. Registration remains open for one more week.
The event is aimed at organisations seeking to move beyond identifying climate exposure. Specifically, it addresses how to manage, rank, and address risks across your own sites and supplier networks.
Supply chains already disrupted, yet financial impacts remain unquantified
A 2026 Capgemini Research Institute survey of 2,100 executives from 701 organisations found that nearly nine in 10 respondents had experienced climate-related disruption to their supply chains. Despite this widespread impact, only 15% said their organisations had fully quantified the financial consequences of climate-related disruption. Meanwhile, slightly more than one-quarter had assessed climate risks across their extended value chains or deployed climate-risk analytics tools.
The gap between awareness and implementation is therefore substantial. Consequently, businesses continue to report exposure without understanding the full financial effect or identifying which sites, suppliers, and processes face the greatest danger. This pattern creates a significant problem. Boards receive risk assessments, but operational teams lack the prioritised action plans needed to protect facilities or maintain production.
The same Capgemini research found that 83% of executives expected adaptation spending to increase over the following 12 to 18 months. In addition, 68% said their organisations actively prioritised climate adaptation, up from 56% in 2025. These figures suggest that adaptation is moving higher up the corporate agenda. Nevertheless, they also highlight the difficulty of translating concern into quantified, financed, and delivered action.
Location-specific hazards require site-level analysis
Climate hazards rarely affect an entire organisation uniformly. Two facilities in the same country may face very different levels of flood, heat, drought, or wildfire exposure. Furthermore, a single supplier disruption can affect production far beyond the location directly hit by an event. As a result, companies need location-specific climate-risk intelligence across individual sites and supplier networks.
SmartResilience describes its service as providing this location-based approach. It helps businesses identify exposure and prioritise resilience measures. This granular analysis is significant because aggregate national or sector-level assessments do not reveal which warehouse, factory, or transport route requires investment first. Moreover, generic risk scores cannot support capital-planning decisions when budgets are limited and multiple sites compete for funding.
The masterclass will address how to translate physical hazards into business-specific risks at site and supply-chain level. For example, it will examine how to quantify potential operational and financial consequences. It will also cover prioritising adaptation measures according to urgency, value, and feasibility. In addition, the session will explore building an investment case for resilience projects and connecting climate-risk findings with operational decisions and long-term capital planning.
Case studies will examine how organisations have overcome delivery barriers and evaluated improvements in resilience. The session will also address assigning responsibility for implementing and monitoring measures. This practical focus reflects a broader shift in expectations. Organisations are increasingly being asked not only to report climate exposure, but also to demonstrate how they are managing it.
Water scarcity and resource access influence strategy more than emissions targets
The Capgemini findings indicate that businesses are reassessing access to critical resources. More than seven in 10 executives said access to energy, water, and other resources had greater influence on sustainability decisions than emissions-reduction targets. Moreover, 61% expected water scarcity to become a greater constraint on growth than energy availability over the next five years.
These pressures make adaptation a strategic issue rather than a standalone environmental programme. Resilience measures may involve capital investment in flood protection, cooling, drainage, backup power, or water efficiency. They may also require alternative logistics routes, supplier diversification, or changes to facility design and operating procedures. Consequently, adaptation planning must integrate with procurement, operations, finance, and risk management, not sit in a sustainability team working in isolation.
Supply-chain resilience is particularly important. Disruption at a supplier, transport hub, energy provider, or water-intensive facility can create cascading effects across procurement, manufacturing, distribution, and customer service. Therefore, companies need visibility over the climate exposure of critical suppliers and infrastructure dependencies. Without this visibility, adaptation plans remain incomplete.
Five questions every adaptation programme should answer
The central message of the event is that a climate-risk assessment should be treated as the beginning of a decision process, not its conclusion. A useful adaptation programme should answer five practical questions.
- What can be affected? Identify exposed assets, locations, suppliers, infrastructure, and critical processes.
- How serious could the impact be? Estimate consequences for revenue, costs, production, safety, service delivery, and reputation.
- What requires action first? Rank risks according to likelihood, severity, time horizon, and the organisation's ability to respond.
- Which measures offer the greatest value? Compare adaptation options, costs, co-benefits, and implementation constraints.
- Who is accountable? Assign ownership, budgets, deadlines, and performance indicators so that resilience becomes part of normal governance.
This approach can also improve the quality of climate disclosures. Reporting is more credible when it is supported by evidence of operational decisions, funded measures, and progress against defined resilience objectives. Furthermore, investors and stakeholders increasingly expect to see how companies are translating risk assessments into tangible protective measures.
UK Climate Change Committee calls for clearer private-sector action plans
The UK Climate Change Committee has argued that businesses and financiers need a clearer action plan if the private sector is to strengthen resilience to climate shocks. This recommendation reflects the gap between rising adaptation priorities and limited value-chain assessment. It also underscores that many organisations remain caught between awareness and execution.
Closing that gap will require closer cooperation between sustainability, finance, risk, procurement, operations, and board-level decision-makers. It will also require better data about the location and criticality of assets and suppliers. In addition, companies need clearer assumptions about future climate conditions and a willingness to invest before disruption occurs. Waiting until a flood or heatwave forces reactive spending often results in higher costs, longer downtime, and reputational damage.
Resilience therefore becomes a competitive issue. Companies that identify and address climate exposure early can protect margins, maintain service levels, and secure tenders that require demonstrated climate-risk management. Conversely, businesses that delay adaptation may face higher insurance premiums, supply-chain failures, and exclusion from procurement frameworks that prioritise operational resilience. For more information on how SBS supports ESG compliance and carbon reporting services, visit our compliance hub.
What UK SMEs should consider now
The practical significance of the edie-SmartResilience session is its emphasis on implementation. Its focus is not simply whether an organisation has measured climate risk, but whether it can use that information to protect business continuity, support investment decisions, and strengthen resilience across its value chain. For UK SMEs, this translates into several areas of focus.
First, understand where your critical operations and suppliers are located. Second, assess which climate hazards pose the greatest risk to those locations. Third, quantify the financial and operational consequences of disruption. Fourth, prioritise adaptation measures based on urgency, cost, and impact. Fifth, assign clear ownership and accountability for delivery.
Many SMEs face resource constraints that make comprehensive climate-risk assessments difficult. However, starting with your most critical sites and suppliers can make the task more manageable. For example, if a single supplier provides a component essential to your main product line, understanding their exposure to flooding, heat stress, or water scarcity should be a priority. Similarly, if one warehouse holds the majority of your inventory, investing in flood defences or relocating stock may be more cost-effective than paying for repeated disruption.
Public-sector suppliers should also be aware that procurement frameworks increasingly require evidence of climate-risk management. PPN 06/21, for instance, requires suppliers bidding for central government contracts above £5 million per annum to publish a Carbon Reduction Plan. While this focuses primarily on emissions, resilience is becoming a parallel concern. Demonstrating that you have identified and managed climate risks to your operations and supply chain can strengthen tender responses and protect contract performance. Our net-zero program for carbon reporting compliance supports SMEs in meeting these requirements.
Insurance is another consideration. Insurers are refining their pricing to reflect climate exposure, and some properties or activities may become uninsurable without adaptation measures. Investing in flood barriers, cooling systems, or backup power may therefore reduce premiums or maintain access to cover. Consequently, adaptation can sometimes pay for itself through lower insurance costs and avoided losses.
Finally, adaptation should be integrated into your broader sustainability and business planning. Climate resilience is not a one-off project. It requires ongoing review as climate conditions change, new sites are opened, suppliers are added, and business models evolve. Therefore, building climate-risk assessment into annual business planning, capital budgeting, and supplier reviews will help ensure that resilience remains current and effective.
Registration open until 12 November 2026
The edie masterclass, titled "Beyond compliance: Turning climate risk insights into practical adaptation," takes place on Thursday, 19 November 2026. It runs from 1:00 p.m. UK time, 8:00 a.m. US Eastern, 5:00 a.m. US Pacific, and 2:00 p.m. Central European time. The session lasts 45 minutes, followed by a 15-minute audience Q&A. Registration remains open for one more week.
For SMEs seeking to move beyond disclosure and toward operational resilience, the session offers a practical framework for converting climate-risk data into prioritised action. It will examine how to identify exposed assets, quantify consequences, rank risks, compare adaptation options, and assign accountability. The case studies will provide real-world examples of how organisations have overcome delivery barriers and evaluated improvements in resilience.
To register for the masterclass, visit the edie website. For further information on climate adaptation and business resilience, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero provides policy updates and guidance. The UK Climate Change Committee publishes independent advice on adaptation planning and progress. In addition, the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership offers research and frameworks on corporate climate resilience.
Climate-risk assessment has become standard practice. The challenge now is to ensure that assessment leads to action. This requires better data, clearer priorities, and stronger links between sustainability teams and operational decision-makers. It also requires boards to treat resilience as a strategic investment rather than a compliance cost. The edie-SmartResilience masterclass addresses these challenges directly, providing a practical roadmap for turning climate insights into protective measures that safeguard facilities, supply chains, and long-term business performance.