The Climate-Adaptation pundits are talking…just not about a corporate role

Andrew Winston’s “The Growing Divide: Climate Adaptation vs. Denial”
NYT’s “A City Prepares for a Warm Long-Term Forecast.” (disclosure: I hatched this story with Ms. Kaufman when I worked for the City of Chicago)
Bill McKibben’s “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

I’m surprised how many articles in my recent blog reading have been so direct about climate change happening.

Many of these stories, I maintain, miss the corporate angle.

We should learn from Hurricane Katrina that private enterprise can be the real victim in a climate crisis. Research from that event found that “some 60% of the businesses in the New Orleans area were forced to close.” “Statistically, 85% of these businesses will never reopen.”

Of course, that has huge implications for community resilience since those businesses provide the jobs that keep the community alive. On the other hand, some of those companies forced to close had to do so not because of direct losses to their facilities, but because their employees weren’t able to return to work. Their community services – schools, day care facilities, police forces, health care – were not set up to support them.

So while I appreciate that big climate thinkers are now thinking adaptation, I am eager for them to join me in thinking about business resiliency; business climate adaptation is at the heart of community climate resiliency.