Environment Agency and Defra: Climate Resilient SME workshops

Lead Organisation

Sustainability West Midlands
Project Managers: Alan Carr (Sustainability Adviser), Anna Bright (Chief Executive)

Overview

SWM has convened many workshops over the past years to help small businesses take those first steps to becoming more resilient. Two members of the SWM team are officially accredited by the Small Firms Development Initiative to use the Business Resilience Healthcheck and we have done so to support businesses extensively in the past. As such, we can also offer more one-to-one engagement with businesses to help them through this process.

Results

Becoming more resilient to weather extremes and climate change has reduced the cost of damage to businesses. It will also bring about economic benefits, as you stand tall ahead of your competitors in times when resilience is needed. It will allow you to not only continue business as usual, but also diversify your markets and inject innovation into your products.

Using the Healthcheck to achieve resilience is simple and easy to use, and covers a broader range of considerations beyond risk solely from climate change and weather.

“Having been previously flooded attending the Business Resilience event in 2013 was a great opportunity to review our systems and procedures. We used the Business Resilience toolkit to produce what we feel is a robust Business Resilience Plan which now covers all sorts of eventualities, not just flooding.”

– Morris Site Machinery, Staffordshire.