Carry out a physical survey to assess the risk levels of flooding to your buildings and access roads based in a range extreme weather scenarios. Develop an emergency evacuation strategy for your building?

To protect against extreme weather events, ensure your business has a resilient data and online services backup and recovery plan with cloud and other off-site options?

Ensure your building has adequate cooling capacity based on various heatwave scenarios.

Have a work from home plan developed for all departments to minimise risk to employees during extreme weather events.

Does your plant and equipment need uninterrupted power or require a safe shut down procedure during power failures on your premises? Consider whether you need to install or have access to a generator capable of running critical services.

Carry out a risk assessment of your supply chains and build resilience by having alternative suppliers and logistics options in place for at risk items. This should also include mitigation policies for communications, power and water supply interruptions.

Your business continuity plan should consider what you would do if critical services were disrupted, especially time-critical supplies.

To minimise disruptions, many businesses will ask their suppliers to have an incident recovery plan and/or have a preselected business continuity operating location.

Start now. Build adaptation into existing processes and map out the often complex interconnections within your supply chain that are already vulnerable to disruption.

Develop a contingency plan for servicing your customers during extreme weather.

Have a communication strategy to inform your customers of disruptions.

Climate related factors can shift long term demand patterns for certain products and services. Assess the vulnerability of your products and services to these potential changes and plan to adapt or change your offerings and business model to mitigate any negative impacts.

Ensure you have strategy to have sufficient business finance to cover costs if your business must close during an extreme weather event and for remediation expenses after an event.

Review existing insurance policies to ensure they will cover more frequent climate related extreme weather events. Current flood maps may be quickly outdated with shifts in weather patterns.

Investors and banks will increasingly look for your climate adaptation plans as part of your business plans. Develop a comprehensive plan to include with financial projections.

The climate related challenges your business will experience are shared by many other businesses in your locality and in your industry area. Develop collaborative initiatives with other businesses to share the expense and workload of building greater resilience. Work closely with your smaller suppliers to assist them with this task.

Build a resilience culture in your organisation by involving your employees in the decision process.

Climate adaptation is most successful when it promotes both business and societal wellbeing. Support community wide initiatives to improve flood protection, plant trees and improve critical infrastructure in your locality.