Building a Climate Resilient Business Resource Kit

Understand your business’s climate change risks and how to address them

The evidence of climate change is growing increasingly hard to ignore. Each year, stories of record-breaking temperatures, heatwaves, forest fires, floods, and droughts dominate news headlines around the world. While it is challenging to attribute climate change to any single event, climate change is increasing the occurrence and severity of extreme weather events. The impacts of an increasingly warming world are being felt locally, with consequences that can reverberate across the globalized economy. Understanding the urgency of the climate crisis, governments and businesses around the world have responded by committing to reducing their GHG emissions, with commitments to achieve net-zero by 2050 or sooner.

Partners in Project Green’s Building a Climate Resilient Business Resource Kit is designed to help businesses across the Greater Toronto Area with:

  • Understanding their climate change risks
  • Determining how to evaluate and prioritize these risks
  • Learning about potential strategies to address them

Through providing an overview of global and local climate change impacts, readers will be able to better grasp the implications of climate change in their communities and what it means for their business. The main goal of this resource kit is to provide local context for climate change risks in the GTA and support businesses as they prepare for them.

The Resource Kit consists of several modules to provide optimal business support including:

  • Summary reports from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provide background information for this Resource Kit
  • Primers on climate change science and projections for the Toronto Area
  • Overviews of Impacts of climate change on human health, buildings and infrastructure, agriculture and food security, supply chain, and finance and regulations
  • Mitigation strategies to reduce GHG emissions
  • Support on climate change Adaptation, including an overview of the climate change risk assessment process and potential adaptation strategies
  • Case Studies from organizations taking action on adaptation and enhancing their resiliency

Resource Kit Contents

Background – IPCC Summary Reports

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report series below highlights a strong business case for climate action by businesses. Climate-resilient development is an approach to climate action that combines mitigation with adaptation and an excellent opportunity for businesses to make an impact.

Primers

Impacts

Mitigation

Adaptation

Case Studies

About the Authors

Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s Partners in Project Green (PPG) program is valued in the industrial, commercial, and institutional community as a trusted advisor on environmentally friendly best practices in the GTA. PPG’s position as a reliable liaison between the conservation community and the private sector presents a unique opportunity to provide information to businesses on the current state of climate change issues in the GTA, raise awareness of the multiple benefits of climate change risk assessments, and support the business case for companies to act, which will improve climate change resiliency not only for the participating company, but the surrounding community as well.

Thank you to the climate and business experts who provided input into these resources:

Silver Dart Group logo