From Boardroom to Bedrock: How Tech is Quantifying Climate's Bottom Line

VIENNA, VA – September 01, 2026 – For years, climate change has been a topic of abstract concern for many boardrooms, a line item in a corporate social responsibility report. But the era of abstraction is over. As floods, wildfires, and extreme heatwaves evolve from once-in-a-century events to seasonal certainties, their impact is being measured in disrupted supply chains, damaged assets, and decimated profits. The cost of physical climate risk is no longer theoretical; it’s a multi-trillion-dollar problem demanding a new class of strategic solutions.

Enter a new partnership that aims to translate this complex threat into a clear corporate calculus. Everbridge, a leader in critical event management (CEM), has joined forces with Arcadis, a global design and engineering consultancy. Together, they are rolling out a Climate Risk Assessment (CRA) designed to move organizations beyond vague awareness and into the realm of data-driven, actionable resilience. This collaboration isn't just another software launch; it’s a signal of a fundamental shift in how businesses must prepare to operate on a volatile planet.

The Boardroom Imperative: Quantifying a Trillion-Dollar Threat

The financial stakes have become too high to ignore. Recent analyses paint a sobering picture: S&P Global projects that the annual cost of physical climate risk for the world’s largest companies could swell to $1.2 trillion by the 2050s. The World Economic Forum is even more stark, warning that climate hazards could erase over 7% of an average company's earnings by 2035. This isn't a distant forecast; a 2026 CDP report found that companies anticipate nearly $900 billion in losses from extreme weather, with almost half of those events expected within the next two years.

This escalating financial exposure has transformed climate resilience from a sustainability goal into a fiduciary duty. Investors are demanding clarity, and regulators are following suit. While the U.S. has seen federal regulatory proposals ebb and flow, the global and state-level momentum is undeniable. The EU’s rigorous Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities, for instance, requires companies to conduct detailed, site-specific climate risk assessments to achieve compliance. In the U.S., states like California are forging ahead with their own mandatory disclosure laws, ensuring that for multinational corporations, climate transparency is non-negotiable.

It is this environment that makes the new partnership so timely. The focus is shifting from simply reporting emissions to proving operational resilience. “Climate resilience requires more than understanding future hazards, particularly as it’s becoming a boardroom discussion driving a competitive advantage,” said George Longfoot, Global Director of Climate Technology at Arcadis. “Organizations need to know which assets are most at risk, what the potential impacts could be, and where to focus investment.” The CRA is engineered to provide exactly that—a practical path from a high-level risk assessment to a concrete action plan.

Fusing Climate Science with Crisis Tech

The power of the Everbridge-Arcadis offering lies in its fusion of two distinct but deeply complementary expertises. Arcadis brings the scientific and engineering rigor. With a team of 34,000 specialists and its data-driven Nexus platform, it can model complex, multi-hazard climate scenarios—from future floodplains and heat stress zones to wind patterns and sea-level rise. It answers the crucial questions of what the risks are and where they will manifest.

Everbridge, conversely, provides the operational technology to manage the consequences. Its High Velocity CEM platform is a crisis-tested engine used by over 6,500 organizations to manage critical events in real-time. It excels at answering how to respond when a risk materializes, orchestrating everything from mass notifications to incident management workflows.

By integrating these capabilities, the new Climate Risk Assessment bridges the critical gap between analysis and action. The process involves overlaying Arcadis's granular climate projections onto a company’s specific operational footprint—its factories, data centers, supply routes, and office locations. The result is not a generic report on global warming, but a highly contextualized risk profile that quantifies a facility’s vulnerability to a specific hazard, like a 100-year flood or a prolonged heatwave.

This data is then visualized within the Everbridge platform, allowing decision-makers to see their climate exposure alongside other operational and critical event information. “Organizations cannot prepare for risks they do not fully understand,” noted Dominic Jones, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Everbridge. “By partnering with Arcadis, we are helping customers move beyond awareness to action.” This integrated view allows a company to not only identify a long-term risk to a key supplier but also to pre-emptively build the communication and response plans needed to manage a disruption when it occurs.

From Risk Assessment to Resilient Operations

The practical applications of this integrated approach span nearly every sector of the economy. For a global manufacturer, the CRA can identify which tier-one suppliers are located in future drought-prone regions or which shipping ports are most vulnerable to cyclones, enabling proactive diversification of the supply chain. A recent PwC report highlighting that over 70% of critical mineral production faces significant climate stress underscores the urgency of this capability.

In the financial and real estate sectors, the tool can assess the physical risk exposure across vast property portfolios, informing investment decisions and preventing assets from becoming stranded by uninsurable climate perils. For critical infrastructure providers, the stakes are even higher. Utilities, which face the highest projected costs from climate impacts, can use the assessment to pinpoint vulnerabilities in their power grids and substations, prioritizing hardening investments to prevent catastrophic outages.

This shift represents a maturation of corporate strategy. For too long, business continuity planning focused on isolated events like fires or IT failures. Today, companies must plan for systemic, climate-driven shocks that can cripple entire regions and industries simultaneously. By providing a tool to quantify, visualize, and plan for these complex risks, Everbridge and Arcadis are equipping businesses to build a deeper, more adaptive form of resilience.

In the commercial landscape of 2026, resilience is rapidly becoming the new currency of corporate value. The ability to anticipate and adapt to disruption is no longer just a defensive measure but a key competitive differentiator, and partnerships like this are building the essential toolkit for the leaders of tomorrow.