Written by David Leathers, Director of Climate & Extreme Weather, Health Action Alliance
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a version first published by Training Industry for learning and development leaders in April 2026.
Last chance to register! Join our June 18 webinar to learn how your organization can anticipate disruption, adapt under stress, and recover quickly with less loss.
Earlier in this series, we made the case that extreme weather is a workforce risk business leaders can’t afford to overlook, and that responding to it well requires cross-functional coordination.
Our final installment is about the “how”. Once you’ve built your team and buy-in that workforce resilience matters, you need tools that help you see the risk clearly, quantify what it costs, and pressure-test whether your current plans hold up in the face of disaster.
Start With a Map: Where Is Your Workforce Exposed?
The first question most teams need to answer is surprisingly simple: which of our people face which hazards, and how is that changing?
Most organizations have a business continuity plan, but those plans tend to focus on facilities, supply chains, and IT. The workforce dimension — the health, safety, and productivity of employees — is often addressed in broad strokes, if at all. Closing that gap starts with location-specific, hazard-specific data.
Some free federal tools to explore:
- FEMA’s National Risk Index maps county-level risk for 18 natural hazards, including extreme heat, flooding, hurricanes, and wildfires. It also accounts for social vulnerability and community resilience, so it captures not just where physical threats are highest, but where employees may have fewer resources to recover. For organizations with distributed workforces, overlaying employee location data against these maps is one of the most useful first moves a team can make.
- NOAA’s Climate Explorer adds the forward-looking dimension. It pulls historical trends and future projections for temperature, precipitation, and extreme weather events at the county level. If a region where you operate is projected to see extreme heat days double over the next 20 years, that shifts the conversation from reacting to last year’s event to planning for the next decade.
Translate Exposure Into Business Risk
Exposure data is necessary, but on its own may not unlock investment. For that, the risk has to be expressed in terms the rest of the organization already tracks, for example health care costs, productivity, injuries, and retention. This is where the Climate Health Cost Forecaster, developed by Mercer and the Health Action Alliance, changes the conversation. It helps employers estimate how climate-related health risks translate into long-term health care costs for their specific organization and identifies their top extreme weather hazards. For a lot of teams, this is the tool that moves the discussion from “environmental risk” to “business risk” and gets the attention of people in finance and benefits who might not otherwise see climate as relevant to their role.
Research from the La Isla Network’s field studies also support the business case for worker protection. They found that structured heat protection programs — rest protocols, shade, hydration, health monitoring — delivered a 60% return on investment, with fewer hospitalizations and measurable productivity gains. The Climate and Worker Health Scorecard can serve as a starting point to understand what extreme weather prevention and response systems your organization has in place. Ultimately, preventing weather-related harm is cheaper than treating it, and healthier workers are more productive ones.
Making that case internally is partly a sustainability challenge. Finance needs cost projections. HR needs implications for benefits and retention. Safety needs injury and productivity data. Part of the work is making sure each function encounters the evidence through its own lens, translating climate risk into the language that moves each audience. That’s something sustainability professionals already do every day.e in translating these perspectives into a shared understanding, ensuring the same data resonates across different audiences.
Find the Gaps, Then the Actions That Fill Them
Mapping exposure and pricing the risk eventually raises the next question: so what do we actually do? That’s where most teams get stuck. The range of possible actions from emergency protocols and benefits design to manager training and communications is broad enough to feel paralyzing.
One way through is to work function by function. HR has a distinct set of levers — benefits design, leave and flexibility policies, people analytics, manager support — and the actions that fit under each are different from what OHS, operations, or facilities might own. Extreme Weather + Work gives employers the tools and connections they need to support their workforce before, during, and after extreme weather. Through free function-specific resources, we organize solutions across three tiers — what to start today, what to build on, and what leading organizations are doing — so teams can see both the immediate moves and the longer arc. Parallel guides are available for HR and OHS teams, with more functions to come.
Where Sustainability Comes In
Sustainability’s contribution is connecting external climate signals into internal action and turning data into shared understanding. A few places to start:
An Ongoing Effort
- Shared literacy across functions. Different teams describe the same risks in different terms — safety tracks incident rates, HR tracks leave and benefits utilization, finance tracks losses. Sustainability can build the shared foundation that lets them plan from the same starting point, drawing on the climate data and materiality frameworks you already manage.
- Manager readiness. When a weather event hits, employees don’t call safety or HR. They look to their direct manager. Scenario-based training, grounded in the hazards the risk tools surface for your specific locations and the policies the HR guide recommends, prepares managers to act with confidence rather than improvise.
- Cross-functional climate strategy. Sustainability leaders must ensure that the organization’s climate strategy is reflected in not just disclosures and reports, but how managers across functions lead and how employees experience the workplace.
Workforce resilience isn’t a single project with a finish line. It’s a capability that grows over time, through better data, stronger coordination, and repeated practice. What’s new is that the tools to support that capability are now available and accessible.
Extreme Weather + Work exists to help employers put these tools to work. For a growing library of free tools and resources, visit extremeweatherandwork.org.
Your organization will face disruption. The only real question is whether the people responsible for preparing your workforce will choose to act now.
David Leathers leads the Extreme Weather + Work program at the Health Action Alliance, helping businesses address climate-related risks to workers and build resilience across operations and communities. He previously advanced global sustainability standards at B Lab and led impact measurement initiatives at Deloitte.
