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Does your company's climate risk reporting account for the people doing the work? Here's how to add workforce climate resilience to your sustainability assessments, ratings, and reports.
Sustainability teams already track many extreme weather risks and impacts — from physical asset exposure to supply chain disruption to office closures — to give the company a clear picture of what needs to be managed. But that picture often leaves out the people doing the work. Do your assessments account for the workforce health risks and impacts of heat exposure, wildfire smoke, severe storms, and other weather events?
As a sustainability leader, you already help coordinate the process that decides what gets measured, managed, and disclosed. This guide helps you bring climate workforce health into that process and turn it into something your company can prepare for and respond to. It offers a range of strategies, from quick wins to longer-term investments, so you can start where you are and build from there.
Map where extreme weather-driven health impacts fit across the frameworks you already report to. Before you write anything new, do a quick check of your current disclosures and ratings — your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report, CDP, EcoVadis, and the investor questionnaires you answer — and mark where health could fit in each. You'll usually find several existing homes for it, which means less net-new reporting and a faster path to the decision-makers who already look at those documents.
Define your terms before you measure against them. “Extreme heat exposure” needs a working definition. The right one depends on geography, humidity, job type, work intensity, personal protective equipment (PPE), and local regulation. Work with occupational health and safety leaders to develop a methodology for classifying heat and extreme weather days, drawing on resources like the National Weather Service's heat stress and wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) guidance. That keeps your numbers consistent across sites and defensible when you disclose them.
Baseline what you already know before you set a target. You can't commit to reducing heat-related incidents by a number you've never measured. Pull together what exists — incident logs, absence records from past events, the list of sites in hot or hazard-prone regions — into a rough internal baseline.
Find the protections you already have but aren’t getting credit for. Ratings providers like EcoVadis score occupational health and safety directly. Walk through your most recent submission and check whether your evidence captures your heat protocols, air-quality shutdowns, cold-weather provisions, water and shade for outdoor crews, etc. Talk to facilities and site managers to surface what's actually happening on the ground. Look for resilience practices that may not be part of a formal safety program, such as modified shifts, work-from-home flexibility on poor-air-quality days, transportation support during storms, and cooling breaks.
Formalize your protections into a written policy. Many companies have informal weather safety practices that are never documented as policy, which means they don’t get scored for climate health protections already in place. Closing the gap between practice and documented policy is an easy way to improve your ratings, formalize your adaptation measures, and apply them consistently across locations.
Give climate health its own line in your materiality assessment. Many sustainability teams already use double materiality assessments to weigh their company's impact on people and the planet, as well as the financial risks those issues pose to the business. When you run your next double materiality assessment, don't bury extreme weather under a general human capital or health and safety heading. Score it as its own topic on both dimensions: impact (how heat, smoke, flooding, and storms affect worker health, safety, and income) and financial risk (how climate-driven productivity loss, worker absence, injury claims, and turnover affect the business). Seek input from the people who see what you may be missing — HR, occupational health and safety, facilities, and the site managers in your hottest and most exposed locations. Their perspective is what separates a real assessment from a desk exercise.
Add workforce impacts to your enterprise risk register. If you or your risk team maintains an internal enterprise risk register, add risks that impact workers — heat exposure, smoke days that halt work, and storm displacement that disrupts staffing. Each risk should have an owner and a risk rating to ensure the hazard is reviewed and addressed.
Add a workforce layer to the physical climate risk you already disclose. If you report to CDP (formerly known as Carbon Disclosure Project), align with IFRS S2, or follow other common disclosure frameworks, you're already naming physical risks such as heat, flooding, and wildfires. For each risk, add a sentence on who is exposed and what it costs the business: which roles, how many workers, in which locations, and the operational consequences. "Rising heat is a physical risk" becomes "Rising heat is reducing working hours for outdoor maintenance crews across our Gulf Coast sites." That reframe turns an abstract hazard into a defined workforce risk that leadership can act on.
Build On It
Set workforce resilience goals in your ESG report. Your sustainability report likely already carries goals for emissions, water, and waste. Add at least one for the workforce; a goal in the report creates shared accountability and encourages leadership to back it with resources. A few sample goals you can adapt:
Every high-heat-exposure site will have a heat illness prevention plan by [year].
By [year], [X%] of employees will be aware of benefits available to them that ease the impact of weather-related events.
Reduce heat-related worker incidents by [X%] against a baseline year.
Extend extreme weather worker protections to priority suppliers in high-risk geographies by [year].
Pick KPIs that assess whether employees are protected. Pair leading indicators (are we preparing?) with lagging ones (did it work?). Do the thinking up front and choose a small, honest set:
Coverage and preparedness (leading indicators): share of high-exposure workers covered by a heat action plan; share of sites with air-quality thresholds that trigger a change in work; share of workers trained to recognize heat illness; share of managers trained on the company’s extreme weather resilience plan.
Outcomes (lagging indicators): heat-related incidents per [1,000] workers; workdays lost to extreme weather events; near-misses reported during extreme conditions.
Equity: whether protections reach contract, temporary, and outdoor workers, in addition to salaried staff.
Connect the story across your own workforce and your value chain. Reporting frameworks typically treat your own workers and the workers in your supply chain as related-but-separate topics. Rather than scattering worker mentions through your ratings submission or sustainability report, pull them into one clear thread — a short section that puts the goal, the KPIs, and the programs in one place, and shows how you're protecting people inside and beyond your own walls. A connected narrative reads as strategy as opposed to just compliance.
Benchmark how your peers do or don’t disclose climate risks to the workforce. Read how industry peers handle workforce climate resilience in their reports and ratings. Where peers are silent, you have room to lead; where they're ahead, you have a ready model and a case for catching up. Sustainability teams already benchmark competitors on emissions and governance, so this should be a familiar exercise applied to new ground.
Add an extreme weather lens to the metrics you already track. Once you've chosen your KPIs, set up a simple internal dashboard that collects data year-round instead of scrambling each reporting cycle. Pull the numbers from the systems that already track safety incidents, absences, site data, and site data, and work with the teams that own them to break the numbers out by weather conditions. For example, occupational health and safety teams already track total recordable incident rates. Ask them to report those rates separately for the periods during and after a defined extreme weather event.
Turn your ratings feedback into strategy. Ratings like EcoVadis return a corrective action plan that spells out where you lost points. Read it through a workforce lens and prioritize fixes that together protect workers and raise your score.
Lead the Field
Put an internal price on worker climate risk. Many companies already use an internal carbon price to steer decisions. Apply the same logic to people: Estimate the cost of worker heat exposure — lost productivity, absence, injury, turnover — and carry it as a real number into financial decisions. When you build the business case for a new site or a retrofit, include projected weather-driven productivity loss as a line item. Pricing worker climate risk this way makes it visible, so it can be weighed against other costs when decisions are made.
Tie a slice of incentive pay to workforce resilience. Some companies already link executive compensation to safety or emissions performance. Extend it by attaching a portion of executive or site manager incentives to workforce climate resilience KPIs.
Pilot the metric before the frameworks require it. Ratings agencies and disclosure standards may eventually expect companies to report on workforce climate resilience, the same way they now expect emissions numbers. Get ahead of it; partner with a handful of peers to define and pilot a common set of metrics, then bring what you learn to investor and disclosure working groups. Companies that help shape a new standard have more influence over what will eventually be adopted across the board.
Disclose a maturity trajectory, not just a snapshot. Instead of reporting a list of programs, report where your organization sits on a resilience maturity curve — reactive, managed, or strategic — and commit publicly to moving up it year over year. Pair it with protections tied to physical thresholds (e.g., wet-bulb globe temperature triggers informed by climate projections), and commit to tightening those thresholds as conditions warm. This shifts your disclosure from "here's what we did" to "here's the trajectory we're accountable to."
Workforce readiness requires coordination across teams. Explore guides designed for more functions at your organization, and learn more about the Extreme Weather + Work initiative.
Human Resources (HR) Readiness strategies for HR focus areas including benefits design, leave policies, people analytics, and more.
Extreme Weather + Work Home Learn how your organization can support workers before, during, and after extreme weather.
About Extreme Weather + Work
Extreme Weather + Work is an initiative of the Health Action Alliance. We bring together leaders who rarely sit in the same room and connect them with peers across industries, giving them the research and tools they need to support their people before, during, and after extreme weather.
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