Businesses need resilience amid high environmental uncertainty

They must step out of their commercial cocoons and take on challenges of the environment in the face of an uncertain future

- LEENA SRIVASTAVA

The India Meteorological Department, while defending its failure to forecast the severity of last week's storm in Delhi, explained the difficulty of predicting sudden and extreme changes resulting from the interaction of multiple weather systems from different directions. It emphasized the need for much denser weather monitoring systems and greater sophistication in analytical capabilities to make forecasts at relevant geographical scales and within appropriate time spans for action to be taken in advance.

Understandably, assessing the local impact of climate change is a critical challenge for industry, agriculture and everyone else.

However, climatic changes are not waiting for India's capacities to develop. The World Meteorological Organization's State of the Global Climate Report released in March highlights record increases in temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, apart from unprecedented sea levels, that translate to a multitude of extreme weather events which afflict us with increased frequency and intensity.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), in its 2025 Global Risks Report, places extreme weather events as the second-greatest risk in a two-year time frame; in its 10-year time frame, this moves to the first position, with the top four risks all related to the environment, reflecting perceptions of rapidly depleting environmental and natural resources.