Building resilient communities: adapting to climate risks

Extreme weather events and natural disasters are happening more frequently and with increasing intensity. Alongside this, investors and lenders are implementing stringent ESG, sustainability and ‘climate readiness’ mandates to unlock funding. This means our clients now need to proactively plan for and manage events caused by climate change, while at the same time, meeting evolving investment drivers and stakeholder expectations. With ongoing disruption as the norm, the landscape for infrastructure risk management and disaster response is changing. Traditional hazard and climate risk assessments are prescriptive, expensive, time-consuming and often not connected to a broader resilience vision. New solutions are needed.

In response to these challenges, we are developing a new solution to help our clients proactively plan for, adapt and respond to immediate and future threats. We call this solution ‘Climate Risk and Resilience’, it’s a holistic approach that encompasses a suite of interconnected services, processes, and creative problem-solving techniques to help our clients better respond to climate change-related threats to their business. 

Using this adaptive framework, we ‘plug in’ any existing planning that our client may have undertaken and then work through various scenarios. We then identify a tailored suite of climate risk assessment, management and response solutions for our clients to consider for application at all scales. Through this exercise, we can create a workable blueprint for fully integrating climate risk and resilience into their operations.

Climate Risk and Resilience is a scalable solution, tailored to tackle complex challenges at any stage of planning, program management or asset lifecycle. By taking a macro view, we can account for intersecting social, cultural, economic and environmental factors in our recommendations to clients and help them focus on outcomes and value to stakeholders. 

Our approach enables us to dig deeper into our clients’ challenges through a facilitated engagement process, gathering new perspectives and identifying new voices to bring to the table. In doing so, we can identify actionable pathways towards a more resilient future for our clients, the infrastructure they deliver and the communities they serve. 

With a focus on collaboration, Climate Risk and Resilience draws on innovative approaches such as design thinking, origination and co-creation, to creatively work through the information and insights gathered. This smarter, more collaborative way of working helps to rapidly identify a logically phased ‘resilience roadmap’ that can then be planned and funded in stages.

Meaningful client partnerships underpin the success of our Climate Risk and Resilience approach. Our solution is grounded in our ability to foster an environment within which we can test and challenge assumptions. Together, we will create solutions that enable our clients to better respond and adapt to change – ensuring our future communities feel supported by the infrastructure around them.