As part of New York Climate Week 2025, Marsh McLennan hosted a conversation with leaders across sectors committed to climate adaptation and resilience, including those from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) and Resilience First.
Later in the afternoon, representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Allstate, and the federal government, including Rep. Melanie Stansbury (NM-01), met to discuss similar priorities for scaling resilience.
The business case for climate resilience has come into sharper focus in recent years, as extreme weather continues to impact communities and companies worldwide. According to Marsh’s 2025 Corporate Climate Adaptation Survey, 74% of organizations have experienced losses or disruptions to their physical assets due to extreme weather. Beyond physical risks, 67% of respondents report disruptions or losses related to their people and operations.
The Resilience Report 2025, released by the US Chamber of Commerce, Allstate, and the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, helps us think about this impact in financial terms: every $1 not invested in disaster resilience today can cost communities up to $33 in lost future economic activity. Building on our 2024 report, The Preparedness Payoff, this analysis models the long-term economic impacts of various investment scenarios across five major disaster types.
The question becomes: what are organizations doing internally to make the case for climate adaptation and resilience investments across teams, functions, and up to the board and C-suite level? And what role do external stakeholders have to play in helping them move the needle? The following insights reveal the complexity behind these questions, as well as the opportunities (many of which are already underway) to integrate climate resilience into business strategy.
Six key takeaways
Organizations need strong internal and external support to advance climate resilience goals. Below are six critical insights reflecting a series of discussions among industry leaders.
1. Organizations engage different teams in their climate decision-making
With representation from a wide range of businesses and government functions — from Congress, large banks, technology companies, and insurers to consultancy and engineering firms — the discussions illuminated that any given organization’s climate resilience function may sit with different teams and people.
In some organizations, climate resilience decisions originate with engineering teams who observe aging infrastructure or malfunctioning equipment, while others rely on risk and strategy teams that integrate climate as a key element of broader risk management. In many cases, the responsibility primarily lies with a chief sustainability officer who drives communication and decision-making at the executive level. According to Marsh’s survey, this is true for 54% of organizations.
Regardless of how a company is structured, it’s clear that any silos only hinder climate resilience efforts. A cross-functional approach, involving everyone from HR and finance to communications and operations, enables organizations to unify around a shared mission, enhance collaboration across teams, and drive greater innovation.
2. Competing business priorities complicate adaptation and resilience funding
A common thread emerged throughout the conversations: many organizations have a lot to do, and not a lot of time to get it all done. That said, many organizations have started the work by looking inward at how to adapt their own assets. Moving forward, significant work remains to ensure the wider, system-level ecosystem is resilient.
However, the survey also revealed that a majority of respondents (60%) believe their organizations have appropriate levels of funding dedicated to climate adaptation efforts at present. Yet 51% of these respondents do not perform a cost-benefit analysis on implemented measures.
There is an opportunity here to know more, so these organizations can do more to make meaningful investments. Before even making an investment, organizations can use resources like Mercer’s climate health cost forecaster to analyze how extreme climate can affect employee health, as well as organizational healthcare costs.
3. Traditional risk management remains fundamentally important
Leaders emphasized that while innovation drives progress, the core principles of identifying, assessing, and managing risks remain indispensable. By embedding established risk management tools into climate resilience strategies, organizations can build a solid foundation for adaptive capacity to respond to both current and emerging climate risks. Maintaining these practices reduces the cost of risk and ultimately insurance premiums by demonstrating proactive risk reduction to insurers.
That said, understanding and assessing the impacts of chronic climate perils — such as prolonged droughts and extreme heat — needs focus. While acute perils, such as flooding or wind, create visible damage, chronic perils may create more disruption and potentially loss as they pose significant long-term risks. Companies must broaden their risk assessment frameworks to assess chronic perils more closely.
4. It’s not enough to have data — know how and where to use it
Organizations can only manage what they can measure. Industry leaders reiterated that localized data is necessary, recognizing that communities and organizations face distinct climate challenges and resilience priorities. Vulnerability to flood, for example, can vary significantly over a few meters.
Rep. Stansbury spoke to this locality with her involvement in advancing the Water Data Act in New Mexico , as a model for a national approach, which champion the integration and accessibility of critical water data across the federal interagency community to support informed decision-making.
However, the value of data lies in the ability to translate diverse data into actionable insights, which enable organizations to allocate resources more efficiently, engage stakeholders meaningfully, and build resilience that is both relevant and impactful.
It’s important to recognize that large data repositories, such as those within the insurance industry, become significantly more valuable when shared strategically. This data plays a crucial role in informing climate modeling and serves as a powerful tool to support informed decision-making. While models do have limitations, these should not overshadow their potential to provide meaningful insights.
5. Climate resilience can be an investment opportunity and key differentiator
Although 75% of organizations are assessing future climate impacts, many have yet to fully recognize climate adaptation as an investment opportunity to enhance their overall enterprise risk management.
However, consider a technology company that has proactively invested in the resilience of its data centers located in a region prone to extreme heat and climate volatility. By upgrading cooling systems, reinforcing infrastructure against power disruptions, and integrating advanced monitoring technologies, the company not only reduces the risk of costly downtime but also improves operational efficiency and energy use. This forward-looking investment protects critical assets and ensures business continuity, even as climate risks intensify.
Beyond risk mitigation, this commitment to resilience becomes a key differentiator in the marketplace. It strengthens the company’s reputation with customers, investors, and partners who increasingly prioritize sustainability and reliability. Moreover, it opens new avenues for innovation, such as developing climate-resilient products and services that meet emerging market demands. In this way, climate adaptation shifts from a cost center to a strategic investment that drives competitive advantage and long-term value creation.
6. Insurability is increasingly relevant, and not synonymous with insurance
The availability of insurance hinges on effective risk management; the closer a risk becomes to a certainty, the more expensive or unavailable insurance can become.
Insurability serves as a critical indicator and driver of effective risk management, encouraging organizations to adopt proactive adaptation strategies — not merely to secure insurance coverage, but to fundamentally strengthen their resilience and operational sustainability. Insurance only covers a portion of any total loss, which means that effective risk management plays a crucial role in minimizing the overall impact of and planning for adverse events.
Interestingly, Marsh’s recent survey reveals that the primary motivation for organizational adaptation is not driven by concerns over insurance availability or pressure from insurers. In fact, 75% of respondents reported limited or no concern about the current affordability or availability of insurance. However, 53% of organizations reported the need to manage risk as motivation for investing in adaptation.
The role of external stakeholders in advancing resilience
Developing climate resilience will not happen overnight, in a silo, or without external support. Organizations will have to engage diverse range of external stakeholders to go beyond regulatory compliance to effectively manage risk and affect change. From leveraging climate data to engaging with the business community, including infrastructure providers, state and municipal governments, and beyond, collaboration across these groups is already happening, as evidenced by this week’s discussions.
As leaders repeatedly acknowledged, climate adaptation and resilience conversations are happening. However, the true distinction between discussion and action starts with the decision-makers within your organization. While many will inevitably ask, “What are our peers doing?” there is an opportunity to lead — by adopting an approach that not only demonstrates leadership from within but also extends outward through proactive, meaningful collaboration with host of public and private sector partners.
