Building societal resilience: how to turn risk insight into action

At one point during the session’s resilience strategy game, a dice roll left one group with an almost 60% loss of points in a single turn. Their company, a global commodity trading company, had invested in insurance and financial hedging, but when the Atlantic hurricanes hit, they were still exposed as they did not invest in physical asset hardening. At another table, a debate broke out over whether to invest in nature-based solutions or hold cash reserves. “Physical asset hardening is expensive,” one participant argued. “Should we prioritize digital risk modelling and product redesign instead?”

These moments captured the trade-offs explored during the discussion at Swiss Re’s Zurich headquarters, where more than 100 participants from the public and private sectors and civil society gathered during Zurich Climate Week to explore a difficult question: how do we close the growing gap between the risks organizations face and the tools, partnerships and financing available to help manage them?

Professor Reto Knutti, Professor of Climate Physics at ETH Zurich and lead contributor to the IPCC, opened the session with a grounded assessment of where the world stands. Achieving “geological net zero” will require both rapid emissions reductions and durable carbon removals that aim to stabilize atmospheric concentrations over the long term. According to Professor Knutti, progress on both fronts remains uneven and insufficient to meet long-term climate goals.

Two observations from his talk stood out. First, he noted that smaller and less predictable events can create more lasting disruption for businesses and communities than the headline catastrophes that dominate planning scenarios. Second, he reflected on the “horse manure crisis” economics analogy: societies often struggle to solve mounting problems until entirely new ways of thinking emerge. Transformational innovation rarely arrives in a straight line.

Asked what keeps him up at night, and what gives him hope, his answer was simple: he said that the impacts are already here, but so is the next generation pushing for change.

At the center of the session was a climate resilience strategy challenge co-designed by Clarmondial and Swiss Re. Each table represented a company operating in sectors including pharmaceuticals, logistics, consumer goods, commodity trading and real estate. Teams were given ten budget points to allocate across nine resilience investment options, from supply chain diversification and insurance to worker resilience, product innovation and nature-based solutions.

Three shocks were then introduced at random: extreme heat and worker emergencies across South Asia; a tropical vector-borne disease outbreak affecting workforce availability across West Africa and Southeast Asia; and a severe California wildfire season disrupting West Coast logistics. After each shock, teams rolled a die to determine impact levels, with outcomes shaped partly by chance and partly by the resilience measures they had prioritized.

The exercise quickly demonstrated that resilience depends on understanding which risks can be transferred and which must be managed directly. It is the difference between what organizations can insure, hedge, or otherwise transfer, and the disruptions they ultimately need to absorb, mitigate, or prevent. Many groups found that the investments most likely to support long-term resilience, particularly nature-based solutions, were also the hardest to prioritize under immediate budget pressure.

When participants were asked what resilience means to them in the event sign-up form, the responses revealed just how differently people frame the challenge. The most frequently recurring response was resilience as the ability to “absorb, adapt, and recover”. Following this, “thriving rather than merely surviving”, “protecting exposed communities and locations”, and “resilience as a permanent operating mode rather than a crisis response” all surfaced repeatedly. A handful of responses were simply human: "still going on when it gets tiring." That breadth of definition is itself a clue to why resilience is so hard to build: organizations must navigate not one challenge, but many, shaped by who they are, what they stand to lose, which risks they can transfer, and how far into the future they are able to plan. The term “protection gap” is used to describe the difference between economic losses from natural catastrophes and the share that is insured. Globally, natural-catastrophe losses remain unevenly insured; in 2025, nearly half of total economic losses were covered by insurance, according to Swiss Re Institute sigma 1/2026.

Loris Compagno (Nature and Climate Risk Specialist at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions) described how Swiss Re’s capabilities in physical risk assessment, from flood modelling to emerging biodiversity and nature-risk frameworks, can help public and private sector actors better quantify exposure and inform adaptation strategies. Better risk intelligence, including nature and climate risk assessments that rely on evolving methodologies and available datasets, can help support underwriting decisions, investment planning and resilience planning by helping organizations better understand potential exposures and prioritize action.

For Maersk, which operates around 70 port terminals globally, the challenge is translating growing awareness of climate risk into consistent operational approaches across a highly distributed portfolio. Peter Gede (Loss Prevention – Risk Engineering, Maersk Insurance) noted that customers are increasingly looking beyond traditional insurance solutions and asking for more integrated approaches to risk management and resilience. Recent volatility has also increased demand for greater visibility into supply chain exposure and operational disruption risks across interconnected value chains.

For Nestlé, whose sourcing networks span thousands of suppliers ranging from multinational companies to smallholder farmers, resilience depends heavily on the adaptive capacity of upstream producers and communities. Yann Wyss (Global Head of Public Affairs, Nestlé) emphasized that long-term supply chain resilience cannot be achieved through procurement requirements alone. It requires shared investment in regenerative agriculture, farmer livelihoods and the ecosystems that underpin production systems.

Tanja Havemann (Founder & Director, Clarmondial) pointed to examples where businesses of different sizes are already exploring practical ways to strengthen resilience while supporting commercial objectives, from a dairy cooperative improving livelihoods while reducing both costs and emissions, to a US brand investing upstream to support the resilience of its coconut oil supply chain, and initiatives across oil seeds, coffee, cocoa, rice and spices. She noted that resilience priorities are rarely identical across companies, governments and communities, but that identifying areas of overlap can help support collaboration, mobilize additional resources and contribute to more resilient business models.

Several recurring themes emerged throughout the conversation.

One was the tension between short-term pressures and long-term resilience investment. Participants broadly agreed that this is not simply a question of awareness or ambition, but also one of incentives, governance structures, access to expertise and information, and how risk is valued within organizations.

Another centered on nature-based solutions. These need to be contextualized so that they respond to specific resilience challenges, e.g., water stress, soil degradation, heat exposure, flood risk or supply instability. Their value depends heavily on context and on whose resilience is being prioritized. Many “nature-based solution” investments may generate benefits across entire landscapes and supply chains, extending well beyond the organizations directly funding them. That makes collaboration and fit-for-purpose financing approaches essential.

The discussion also highlighted the tension between resilience objectives and procurement. It is clear that there is no single supplier or procurement strategy that works across sectors, commodities and business models. In some cases, procurement flexibility remains critical, and resilience solutions cannot depend solely on long-term commodity off-take agreements. In others, long-term supplier relationships are necessary to support meaningful upstream resilience investment. Context matters.

At its core, strengthening resilience is a coordination challenge: between companies and their suppliers, between public and private sector actors, and between those who benefit from resilience investments and those expected to finance them. Better tools, data, and risk assessment capabilities play an important role in helping organizations understand their exposures and make more informed decisions. Risk assessment is therefore a critical foundation for turning awareness into effective adaptation and loss prevention, but lasting resilience also depends on alignment of incentives and targeted collaboration across stakeholder groups. That was precisely the purpose of the session: bringing together practitioners from different sectors, exploring the real challenges associated with investing in resilience, and forging new connections to turn risk awareness into practical action.