Adapting to climate change
Why is adaptability the new key to your resilience?
Moving from passive risk to a proactive strategy.
Reducing your emissions is no longer enough. Today, climate change is already impacting your bottom line: supply chain disruptions, higher energy costs due to heat waves, and infrastructure vulnerabilities in the face of flooding. Adaptation is not an environmental constraint; it is a lifeline for your business. It involves mapping your critical dependencies to turn your vulnerabilities into drivers of sustainability.
Which companies are affected?
Manufacturing, energy, construction, and services: a cross-sectoral challenge
Any company may be exposed to physical risks or reporting requirements
- industrial sites exposed to physical risks,
- companies dependent on critical resources (energy, water, raw materials),
- organizations subject to reporting requirements (CSRD),
- companies seeking to strengthen the resilience of their business model.
For a business leader or industrial management team, the goal is to anticipate future risks rather than incur unexpected costs and to build climate resilience.
This approach becomes a priority when your business relies heavily on physical infrastructure, critical resources, or exposed geographic locations.
A structured approach to managing your adaptation
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Stress testing and vulnerability assessment
We don’t just identify global risks. We conduct a comprehensive resilience assessment of your physical assets (industrial sites, warehouses) and your strategic supply chains. Using IPCC scenarios, we analyze the vulnerability of your infrastructure and supply chain to concrete threats: extreme heat waves, water stress, floods, or logistics disruptions. The goal is to highlight your critical dependencies and potential breaking points in your model.
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Quantification of impacts and financial prioritization
To turn the assessment into a decision-making tool, we translate physical risks into financial and operational impacts. What is the actual cost of a three-day production shutdown caused by a heat wave? What is the threat to the value of your assets by 2040? This “financial materiality” step allows us to prioritize risks not only based on their probability, but also on their impact on your balance sheet. We thus inform your investment decisions by identifying areas where inaction would cost more than adaptation.
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Joint development of the “High Resilience” roadmap
The final step involves identifying concrete adaptation measures, whether technical (nature-based solutions, building upgrades), organizational (flexible schedules, supplier diversification), or strategic. Each action is evaluated based on its cost-effectiveness and implementation timeline. We provide you with a prioritized and actionable roadmap, designed to secure your short-term goals while anticipating the climate shifts of 2035 and 2050.
Make climate resilience a central focus of your strategic reporting
Beyond operational imperatives, climate change adaptation is now subject to a strict legal framework. With the entry into force of the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), companies must not only report on their climate impacts but also on how climate risks affect their own business models.
Anticipating Double Materiality
Kapstan helps you meet this “double materiality” requirement. We translate your vulnerability analyses into precise indicators for your non-financial reports. By clearly identifying your physical risks and countering them with a robust adaptation plan, you transform a compliance requirement into proof of your long-term risk management.
Reassuring Your Partners and Financiers
An adaptation plan is not just an internal document; it is a strong signal sent to your ecosystem:
- Investors and Banks: You demonstrate the viability and sustainability of your business model, thereby facilitating access to “green” financing and investments.
- Insurers: A company that anticipates its risks (floods, heat waves, storms) is a more insurable company. Your adaptation strategy becomes a key selling point for securing your contracts and premiums.
- Clients: In a context of supply chain tensions, proving your operational resilience is a major differentiator in strategic tenders.
Expertise spanning climate, industry, and strategy
Strategic Planning Meeting
- Validation of the objectives, scope, and specific challenges facing your organization. This step ensures that the approach taken aligns with your actual needs.
Raising awareness among teams and managers
- An educational workshop to clarify the differences between adaptation and mitigation, discuss climate challenges, and bring stakeholders together around a shared vision.
Analysis of Climate Risks and Vulnerabilities
- Identification of relevant risks, analysis of your value chain, and assessment of potential impacts based on climate projections (for the years 2035 and 2055).
Presentation and collaborative development of the adaptation plan
- Presentation of results and development of a prioritized roadmap that aligns with your operational and budgetary constraints.
Integration and implementation of initiatives
- Support in integrating the recommendations into your internal processes to ensure effective and measurable follow-up.
Turn climate risk into a strategic advantage.
Turning a climate risk into a strategic advantage
A resilient company is one that:
- Secures its investments by choosing sustainable infrastructure.
- Protects its profit margins by avoiding unexpected crisis-related costs.
- Strengthens its employer brand and builds customer trust.
Any questions?
There is little uncertainty as to what the climate will be like in 2050, largely determined by the quantities of greenhouse gases already sent into the atmosphere. Beyond that, the future climate will depend mainly on our ability to reduce these emissions. We therefore need to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically. The first pillar of the fight against climate change is mitigation.
However, the consequences of climate change are already visible and we need to adapt to them now, by doing things differently. The second pillar is therefore adaptation to climate change. Its purpose is to propose solutions and make populations, infrastructures and businesses more resilient in the face of new natural risks (flooding, coastal erosion, heatwaves, drought, etc.).
France will experience global warming of around 2°C by 2050. After that date, the evolution will depend on our efforts to reduce emissions. Warming could reach 4°C by 2100, leading to more frequent heat waves, extreme precipitation and rising sea levels. Impacts will vary from region to region and from sector to sector.
The effects of climate change will vary according to region and local context. Urban, mountain and rural areas will be affected differently. It is therefore crucial to adapt solutions to the specific characteristics of each area. Preparing for local risks (heatwaves, droughts) and adopting “no-regrets” measures such as water management are essential.
Yes, France has adopted a baseline warming trajectory to guide adaptation. The 3rd National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (PNACC) 2025 sets out concrete actions to address impacts such as heat waves, flooding and biodiversity loss. The aim is to protect the population and strengthen national resilience.
Adaptation affects all sectors:
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Buildings: improve insulation and construct environmentally-friendly buildings.
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Transport: develop sustainable mobility.
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Energy: switching to renewable energies.
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Agriculture and nature: preventing the risk of fires and greening cities to limit heat islands.
Adaptation must take place at every level, from the individual to the community.
Maladaptation refers to actions which, instead of reducing vulnerability, actually make it worse. For example:
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Inefficient use of resources (air conditioning instead of insulation)
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Transfer of vulnerability (solutions that transfer risks to another system or era)
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Under-adaptation (such as infrastructure that is ill-suited to future risks).
