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As the climate changes, businesses will need to cope with whatever comes our way. This imperative to cope is what I’ll call climate resilience, and everyone from the World Economic Forum to the AARP is talking about it. A lot of the burden for creating climate resilience is placed at the feet of the insurance industry, which is called upon to both to steer business activity through measures to protect property and future construction, and to cover enormous losses.
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But the science is not perfect, and the change is rarely linear. Thus, over and over again, new science shows that data solely from past experience fails to predict future outcomes. A large collection of massively complex climate models2 and the multi-model averages used to evaluate trends continue to improve, but they still need development and refinement to be able to take the steps beyond estimating future temperature and its direct consequences, to more complex hazards such as wind, hail, or snow loads, with high confidence. The overriding issue continues to be model resolution – having the ability to resolve all the small-scale physical phenomena that contribute to the climate over the entire atmosphere and sea/land surface. Bigger computers and improved methods help, but approximations are still necessary.
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The solution, rather, lies within a combination of companies, governments, and strong alliances dedicated to really achieving a higher degree of resilience. Clarity about what’s happening, a resolve to understand it, and the courage to become resilient are important elements for meeting the challenge.
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