Environmental risk in business is not a sustainability talking point. For anyone who runs business continuity, it is a list of very practical problems: a plant under water, a supplier offline for months, employees displaced by a storm in a state where you don’t have an office, and rules that change faster than your planning cycle.
You can’t plan for every hurricane, flood, wildfire, or heat wave. You can plan for what they do to your business. Here is how to think about environmental risk, what the data says, and how to build it into your business continuity program.
| Old View | New View |
| Environmental risk belongs to the sustainability team | Environmental risk is a continuity, supply chain, and people problem |
| Plan for each type of disaster | Plan for the consequences: loss of a site, people, a supplier, or a utility |
| Our hazard map is where our buildings are | Our hazard map is where our people and suppliers are |
| Severe weather is a rare emergency | Severe weather is a predictable event to practice on |
What Environmental Risk in Business Actually Means
For continuity planning, environmental risk falls into three groups:
- Acute physical events. Hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, winter storms, and heat waves. They hit fast and close sites, cut power, and displace people.
- Chronic physical stress. Longer heat seasons, water scarcity, and rising flood exposure that slowly change what it costs to operate in a place, and whether you can.
- Regulatory and market shifts. Emissions rules, disclosure requirements, and customer expectations that change how you have to operate and report.
Global risk leaders rank these near the top. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026, extreme weather events remain the top risk over a ten-year horizon, with half of the top ten long-term risks environmental. Over the next two years, extreme weather drops to fourth, behind risks such as geoeconomic confrontation and misinformation. That is the pattern I see in boardrooms too: leaders agree the risk is large, then fund whatever feels more urgent this year.
The Physical Risk Is Already Here
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information counted 27 separate weather and climate disasters in the US in 2024 that each caused at least $1 billion in damage, about $182.7 billion in total, with at least 568 deaths. Only 2023, with 28, had more. Hurricane Helene alone accounted for $79.6 billion and 219 deaths. (NOAA retired that database in May 2025, so 2024 is the last year it covers.)
Helene shows how environmental risk reaches businesses far from the storm. Storm damage closed Baxter’s North Cove plant in Marion, North Carolina. According to the American Hospital Association, that one plant made 60% of the country’s supply of IV solutions, about 1.5 million bags a day. Hospitals hundreds of miles away, with no storm damage at all, told staff to conserve IV fluids.
That is the lesson for every continuity leader. Your exposure is not only where your buildings are. It is where your critical suppliers are, and where their single plant sits on a flood map. Our post on supply chain resilience goes deeper on finding those dependencies.
Your Hazard Map Moved With Your Workforce
Distributed work changed environmental risk more than most programs have noticed. As I said on Managing Uncertainty, Episode 262, when a Minnesota company hires across the country, “things like hurricanes, which don’t happen here in Minnesota, but can impact your remote workforce, are suddenly a crisis, a business continuity problem that you weren’t thinking about or having to deal with before.”
If a third of your customer service team lives on the Gulf Coast, a hurricane is your problem whether or not you have an office there. Know where your people are, how you’ll account for them, and how their work gets done when they can’t do it.
Regulatory Shifts Are an Environmental Risk Too
Environmental rules can tighten, and they can reverse. Both are disruptions you have to plan for.
- The European Union’s European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) made climate neutrality by 2050 a legally binding goal, with net emissions at least 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. Companies operating in the EU are working under rules built to reach those targets.
- In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted climate disclosure rules in March 2024, stayed them while they were challenged in court, and on March 27, 2025, voted to end its defense of them.
If you operate in several jurisdictions, you can face stricter rules in one market and looser rules in another at the same time. Treat regulatory change as a risk on your register, with an owner who tracks it and tells your business continuity and compliance teams what it means for operations.
How to Build Environmental Risk Into Business Continuity
You don’t need a separate climate program to do this. You need your existing business continuity program to take environmental risk seriously.
- Put it in your risk assessment. Score flood, wind, wildfire, heat, and winter weather for every critical site, using public hazard data such as FEMA’s flood maps and National Risk Index. Our business continuity risk assessment matrix shows how to rank them.
- Plan for consequences, not causes. A flood, a fire, and a tornado all leave you without a building. Your business impact analysis should tell you what happens when you lose a site, a key supplier, power, water, or a group of people, and how long you can last.
- Map your critical suppliers’ locations. Ask where your sole-source suppliers actually make things, and what their continuity plan is for a flood or a hurricane. “We have an SLA” is not an answer.
- Know where your people are. Keep an accurate list of where employees live and work, build an accountability process, and decide in advance how you’ll handle pay and leave when a disaster hits a region.
- Get ahead of the season. Hurricane, wildfire, and winter storm seasons come on a calendar. Review your plans and contacts before each one starts. Our hurricane planning guide has a checklist.
- Exercise it. Run a severe weather scenario that takes out a primary site and a key supplier at the same time, and see what your team does when both happen at once.
Turn Predictable Events Into Practice
Weather is the one crisis that usually announces itself. A storm forecast gives you days of warning, which makes it the best practice your crisis team will ever get. When a hurricane or winter storm is coming, activate your crisis process, even if it turns out you didn’t need it. As Bray Wheeler on our team likes to say: over-respond, don’t overreact.
Preparation also pays. Before founding Bryghtpath, I led Target’s crisis management and business continuity work through Hurricane Sandy. As I told the story on Episode 285, we reopened our locations and distribution channels much more quickly than our competitors, “which gave us a multimillion-dollar advantage in revenue because we were open and they were not.”
Environmental risk is not new. What’s new is how often it shows up, and how far from the storm it reaches. Plan for the consequences, and the next storm becomes an operating problem instead of a crisis.
Keep Going
A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.
- Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity.
- Build the plan. Our Business Continuity services cover the risk assessment, business impact analysis, and plans that turn environmental risk into recovery strategies.
- Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
- Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.
