Edie | New data analysis has found that 74% of businesses have yet to assess climate change risks on their operations.
Researchers noted that the findings indicate a lack of readiness from UK companies in managing increasing climate threats.
The findings, based on a survey of more than 10,000 businesses by the Office for National Statistics, show that fewer than one-in-three businesses express any concern about the impact of climate change on their operations, despite 16% of businesses reporting direct impact by climate change each year, either through flooding, storms or increased heat.
The study found that climate change-related events had already impacted businesses in several ways, including damage to physical infrastructure (20%), employee absence (13%), and local and global supply chain disruption (9% and 5%, respectively).
For those businesses that had assessed their climate change risks, the most common threat was disruption of the supply chain (8%), temperature increase (4%), and increased flooding (4%). However, even in this group, only 15% had taken action to adapt their supply chain to avoid disruption, with 9% and 6% making changes to adapt to increased temperatures and flood risk respectively. Critically, 26% of businesses who assessed at least one risk in their own business had taken no actions to adapt.
The most common actions taken by businesses were monitoring climate risks (5%), implementing a climate change strategy (3%) and setting a net-zero or GHG target (3%).
