A business depends on people being able to travel, work safely, stay healthy, and perform their roles. Climate and nature risks can affect workers directly, and can also disrupt the communities, transport systems, and services they rely on.
Extreme heat, wildfire smoke, flooding, storms, and disease risks can make work unsafe, reduce productive working hours and disrupt people’s ability to travel to, attend, or carry out their jobs. Businesses may face higher costs, staff shortages, delays, lower productivity, safety risks, or greater pressure to protect workers across their own operations and supply chains.
Vulnerabilities
What are the risks to a business's workforce?
The climate and nature pressures that can affect worker health, safety, and availability.
Labour is becoming a less predictable business input as climate and nature risks intensify. Heat can make work unsafe and reduce productivity. Smoke can affect breathing and outdoor work. Floods and storms can stop people reaching work. Disease risks can increase as temperatures, rainfall, and ecosystems change.
These risks can affect people working outdoors, in poorly cooled buildings, in transport, in factories, on farms, in warehouses, in care settings, in construction, or in supply chains where worker protections may be weaker.
How exposed are businesses' workforce?
How exposed workers, worksites, and labour supply chains are to climate and nature risks.
A business may be more exposed if workers are based in hot regions, flood-prone areas, wildfire zones, informal settlements, or places with weak public health systems and limited emergency support.
Exposure can also depend on how people get to work. Workers may be unable to travel if roads flood, public transport stops, extreme heat makes journeys unsafe, or storms damage local infrastructure.
For supply chains, exposure may sit with contractors, seasonal workers, logistics providers, farms, factories, or outsourced service providers. Mapping where workers and key supplier workforces are located can help identify where disruption is most likely to start.
How sensitive are businesses to workforce disruption?
How much the business relies on people being healthy, safe, and available at specific times and places.
Some businesses are highly sensitive to labour disruption because they depend on manual work, outdoor work, shift work, seasonal peaks, specialist skills, or customer-facing services.
A business may be more sensitive if there is little flexibility to change working hours, few backup staff, high turnover, limited cooling or rest facilities, or tight delivery schedules. Sensitivity can also be high where a small drop in staffing would slow production, reduce service quality, increase safety risks, or delay customers
How could labour disruption create wider knock-on effects?
How worker health and availability risks can create wider operational and supply chain impacts.
Labour disruption does not stay contained within one workplace. If workers are affected by heat, smoke, flooding, illness, or unsafe travel, businesses can face lower productivity, more absences, higher turnover, safety incidents, and delays.
These impacts can spread further. If transport workers, warehouse staff, farm workers, construction teams or care workers are affected, disruption can move through supply chains and local services. In severe cases, labour stress can raise costs, weaken local demand, increase pressure on communities, and make it harder to operate reliably in affected regions.
Solutions
How can businesses build workforce resilience to climate risk?
To build resilience, businesses need to understand where workers are most exposed, which roles are most climate-sensitive, and what protections are needed to keep people safe and able to work.
Practical solutions include heat-health plans, shaded and cooled rest areas, adjusted working hours, early warning systems, protective equipment, safer transport, worker training, improved housing, access to healthcare, and stronger labour protections across supply chains.
Examples of business adaptations and responses
Diageo
Diageo is working with suppliers to reduce heat-related risks for workers in its rum supply chain, using evidence-based rest, shade, hydration, and hygiene practices.
AngloGold Ashanti
Reducing malaria risk for workers and mining communities
AngloGold Ashanti reduced malaria-related workforce disruption in Ghana by investing in an award-winning malaria control programme that protects both mine workers and surrounding communities.
