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Map, model, manage: How business continuity plans can drive climate resilience

As extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe, adjusting risk and resilience management practices to this trend is becoming increasingly important.

07/04/2026 · 7 minute read

As extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe, adjusting risk and resilience management practices to this trend is becoming increasingly important. Existing business continuity management (BCM) plans may not adequately cater for the wide-ranging impacts of climate-driven extreme weather, which means existing plans require upgrading or pressure-testing to build greater resilience. As a Risk Manager, paying attention to these developments can reduce business interruption exposures.

From beverages to biotech, manufacturing to mining, companies across all sectors recognise that resilience to climate change is a key part of staying competitive. Marsh’s latest Climate Adaptation Survey reveals that 75% of businesses have experienced losses or disruptions to physical assets, operations, and people due to extreme weather, with supply chains, customers, and critical infrastructure all affected.

Survey respondents identified business continuity management – the set of plans and processes that keep an organisation running, or help it recover quickly, when something goes seriously wrong – as a key lever to strengthen climate resilience. More than half have implemented or are planning to update BCM plans. Yet BCM also emerged as one of the areas where organisations seek additional support most often. The paradox is telling: organisations know BCM matters, but don’t know how to make it work for increasing climate risk.

The reason is structural. Climate risk assessment is typically forward-looking, carried out by sustainability or strategy teams, often to satisfy regulatory reporting requirements. Whereas BCM is operational, owned by risk or continuity teams, and focused on near-term response. Climate intelligence is generated in one part of the organisation and rarely reaches the people actually designing recovery plans.

Closing that gap requires three things: mapping climate risks in a way that is useful for operational planning; modeling scenarios that reflect what a real climate event would actually demand; and managing BCM plans that connect across the organisation rather than sitting in silos. Below, we explore each in turn.

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1. Map

Get climate intelligence into BCM design

Translate hazard data – heat, flood, drought – into operational scenarios, including risks beyond your own site.

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2. Model

Make exercises genuinely ambitious

Test against scenarios that reflect real systemic disruption – not just what fits your existing response capacity.

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3. Manage

Connect plans across the organisation

Review BCM plans against current and future risk horizons, surfacing hidden assumptions and cross-functional gaps.

1. Map: Get climate risk intelligence into BCM design

Many organisations are already performing climate risk modeling by identifying which sites face exposure to heat, drought, flooding, or wildfire, and estimating the financial impact. Marsh recently worked with a mining company in the Pacific region to use these outputs to adjust shift patterns and water management, and for a global car manufacturer to redesign supply chain contingencies. For this to be useful to BCM teams, there is a translation gap that needs addressing. Climate data tells you how much rain you will get, but it does not tell you how that rain could impact your operations, such as stranding your logistics fleet, triggering a supplier’s force majeure clause, or keeping the site offline for three weeks rather than three days. BCM practitioners can benefit from that second layer: climate hazard translated into operational consequence.

Equally important is thinking beyond your own assets, operations, people and ability to respond to an emergency. A persistent blind spot in continuity planning is assuming that everything outside the organisation – suppliers, utilities, transport networks, customers – will keep functioning during a climate event. In practice, a serious storm or flood can disrupt all of these simultaneously. Plans that ignore those dependencies will fail when they are most needed. Our Climate Adaptation Framework is a useful way to consider these.

2. Model: Make scenario exercises ambitious

Most organisations run annual crisis exercises to meet regulatory requirements. These can surface real gaps, but they frequently stop short. Scenarios are often not challenging enough, and the lessons identified rarely make their way back into updated BCM plans. The exercise becomes a compliance activity rather than a genuine stress test.

The deeper problem is often a failure of imagination. Organisations tend to design scenarios that fit within their existing response capacity, which means they never discover what lies beyond it. The COVID-19 pandemic was a sharp reminder of that cost – the scale and simultaneity of its disruption were not in most organisations’ planning assumptions. Robust climate scenario design probes further: not just “what if our site floods?” but “what if our site floods at the same time as our primary logistics partner’s depot, and the regional road network is closed for a week?”

Organisations that treat this as a strategic priority – rather than a compliance box to tick – often produce more robust plans. When the work is done consistently, regulatory compliance follows naturally. When compliance is the only motivation, plans can underperform precisely when they are most needed.

Organisations can leverage their climate risk analyses to provide realistic, yet ambitious, insights into how reality may unfold.

3. Manage: Review and connect plans across the organisation

Many businesses already have BCM plans. The question is whether those plans are fit for the climate risk materialising. In our reviews, we often find that plans are built in isolation and are not designed to handle a crisis that hits multiple parts of the organisation at once.

Part of what makes climate risk particularly challenging to plan for is that it does not present as a single fixed scenario or fit within organisational boundaries. Unlike many forms of disruption – such as a cyberattack or a factory fire – climate hazards can span a wide range of frequencies and severities. A heatwave might last three days or three weeks; flooding might affect one site or an entire region. Stress-testing BCM plans across a range of escalating scenarios, rather than a single baseline event, is therefore essential. It is the only way to identify where existing controls and response arrangements start to break down.

There is a further complication. In principle, BCM is agnostic about the cause of disruption – a well-prepared organisation may already have plans for the temporary or permanent loss of a key asset. But climate events tend to break the assumptions on which those plans are quietly built. Most BCM arrangements assume that if a primary site or supplier is unavailable, the fallback options – alternative locations, backup logistics routes, replacement contractors – remain available. In a climate event affecting a wide geographic area, that assumption frequently does not hold.

This is the regional effect of climate risk, and one of the most underappreciated challenges in BCM design. When a climate event strikes an area, it does not just affect one organisation – it affects every business operating in that geography simultaneously. Emergency services may be overwhelmed or unavailable. Specialist contractors will be fielding calls from dozens of clients at once. Alternative premises identified in a continuity plan may already be occupied by a neighbor facing the same disruption. In a world of increasingly integrated supply chains, several businesses may find themselves competing for the same finite pool of recovery resources at exactly the same moment.

Stress-testing existing plans against realistic climate scenarios – drawing on quantitative modeling at the group level and structured crisis exercises at the asset level – is what surfaces these blind spots before they become operational failures. It identifies where cross-functional dependencies are unmanaged and builds a shared picture of what recovery could look like. And crucially, this review should look forward as well as at current conditions: the climate of 2035 or 2045 will place materially different demands on BCM than today’s.

Recovery today, resilience tomorrow

It is worth being clear about what BCM is, and what it is not. It is not the primary tool for managing climate risk – that is the work of adaptation: strengthening assets, redesigning operations, and transferring residual risk through insurance. BCM is the backstop: the set of plans that activate when disruption happens despite everything else. The goal of upstream risk management is precisely to reduce how often BCM needs to be invoked. But when it is needed, it must work.

Making it work means doing all three things well. Map climate risks in a way that reaches the people who design recovery plans. Model climate scenarios that genuinely stress the organisation, not just the ones it can already handle. Manage plans that connect across functions and look out to future risk horizons, not just today’s. Businesses that do this are not only better prepared for the next climate event – they are building the kind of institutional resilience that will define competitive advantage in the decades ahead.

Our people:

Jack Watt

Senior Vice President, Climate and Sustainability Strategy Team, Marsh

  • United Kingdom

John White

Head of Growth & Innovation, Strategic Risk Consulting, Marsh Risk

Marsh 

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