Climate change is no longer a distant threat, it's a powerful force disrupting infrastructure, operations, supply chains, customer expectations, and financial stability. Organisations must act with resolve and resilience to rise to the challenge.

Our Future Ready® approach empowers our clients to anticipate risks, strengthen resilience, and adapt proactively. Through expert analysis and tailored solutions, we help organisations navigate uncertainty, ensuring they remain strong and sustainable in a rapidly evolving world.

5 key steps to build climate resilience in organisations

1

Embed resilience into strategic planning

Treat climate resilience as a state of being, ensuring infrastructure, people, and systems can perform under stress and uncertainty.

2

Understand and quantify climate risks

Go beyond identifying hazards, assess vulnerabilities and potential impacts to gain a full picture of climate-related risks and opportunities.

5

Act now and plan ahead

Implement immediate measures to manage current weather-related shocks while preparing for longer-term climate shifts through adaptive planning.

4

Monitor, learn, and adapt continuously

Regularly review strategies and performance to stay responsive to evolving climate conditions and emerging risks.

3

Collaborate for smarter solutions

Work with multi-disciplinary experts to co-develop adaptation measures that align with your organisation’s goals, operations, and risk appetite.

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Hazards

We’re all facing the escalating force of climate change, with hazards growing in both frequency and intensity.

These can be acute events, such as unprecedented storms, prolonged droughts, and flooding or chronic shifts such as rising temperatures, increased sea levels and altered seasonal rainfall patterns. Variations in our weather and climate can affect different assets, environments, people, networks, and systems in distinct ways. Identifying these hazards is the first step in safeguarding resilience.

 

Services we provide

We use climate models to assess future conditions under different levels of global warming and decarbonisation, helping clients explore possible futures and understand the pace of change over time.
We use climate models and data to assess climate hazards affecting client assets, populations, or systems, evaluating their frequency, duration, and intensity. 
We help clients assess the vulnerability of assets, populations, and systems to climate hazards, enhancing risk analysis and guiding effective adaptation strategies.
We assess how systems, organisations, and communities can adapt to climate change, mitigate damages, and leverage opportunities, providing clients with a baseline for strengthening resilience.
We assess where climate change could disrupt or damage systems and assets by analysing thresholds, such as temperature extremes triggering infrastructure failure, and identifying vulnerabilities that may lead to cascading impacts for our clients.

Risks and impact

Grasping how climate risks interact and evolve over time is essential for staying ahead. Individual climate hazards, such as heatwaves, flooding, or wildfire can result in risks across a chain of impacts affecting financial stability, operational efficiency, and strategic planning. Our advisory services provide insights into risks and impacts, considering cascades and interdependencies, to ensure organisations can anticipate and mitigate future challenges.

 

Services we provide

We conduct regular assessments of asset condition and performance to identify climate-related impacts, helping clients make informed decisions on maintenance, upgrades, and investments.
We evaluate services, operations, and value chains to identify climate risks, supporting clients reinforce structures, processes, and supply chains for resilience and business continuity.
We assess and quantify climate risks and opportunities considering an organisation’s strategy and financial performance, aiding clients understand their exposure and manage investments effectively across different timeframes.
We help design and deliver ongoing asset maintenance and repairs to ensure functionality and climate resilience, supporting client operational continuity as conditions evolve.
We analyse climate change’s impact on customer needs and markets, helping clients identify risks and opportunities to shape strategy, services, and products for resilience.
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Solutions

Our approach empowers organisations with clear actionable adaptation measures that deliver real-world impact. We blend ‘hard’, ‘soft’ and ‘nature-based’ solutions, combining engineered responses with improvements in processes, knowledge, and capacity-building. With expert collaboration across climate science, engineering, and economics, we evaluate cost-effective strategies, developing adaptation plans and pathways that allow for incremental improvements while maintaining flexibility.

 

Services we provide

We help clients develop strategies and adaptive plans to enhance resilience, identifying optimal opportunities for climate risk management as conditions evolve.
We help review and shape policies, frameworks, and regulations to support climate resilience, enabling clients to take informed, consistent action on climate risks.
We advise on infrastructure and system criteria to ensure functionality and resilience in a changing climate, embedding climate risks into standards and regulations.
We harness natural processes and ecosystems to manage climate risks and enhance resilience, offering cost-effective solutions that also support biodiversity and broader sustainability goals.
We integrate climate considerations into asset management to ensure reliability under changing conditions, helping clients embed adaptation into operations and long-term planning.
We support clients prepare for, respond to, and recover from climate emergencies by developing risk-informed strategies, contingency plans, and early warning systems to protect assets and ensure business continuity.
We develop technical and structural solutions for our clients to safeguard infrastructure and communities from climate risks, minimising damage and disruption.
We facilitate clients assess and disclose climate risks and opportunities to stakeholders, ensuring compliance while integrating climate considerations into decision-making and governance.
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In conversation with Christine Wissink

Christine Wissink shares insights on building resilience into business as usual, emphasizing continuous adaptation and proactive risk assessment.

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Somerset integrated sustainability

Discover how WSP's integrated expertise helps Somerset Council build a resilient future, tackling climate and ecological emergencies.

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Climate risk and adaptation projects

WSP and the Environment Agency

Watch how WSP collaborated with the Environment Agency to enhance the village of Kendal's resilience to climate change through innovative flood risk management and environmental solutions.

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Strengthening Edrington’s supply chain resilience 

We support Edrington with sustainability strategies, including horizon scans, regulation tracking, net zero strategies, carbon accounting, life cycle assessments, sustainable packaging research, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) reporting, ecology assessments, and Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) alignment.

We were tasked with exploring how weather and climate changes affect Edrington's supply chain, evaluating the physical vulnerability of their raw products. The scope included a hazard assessment to determine exposure levels for sourcing regions and a sensitivity analysis to assess product susceptibility to climate hazards. This helped determine the vulnerability of raw products (glass, wood, grain, barley, cork, sherry) to physical risks in the short, medium, and long term under various emission scenarios.

Our vulnerability study identified future procurement risks for raw products. Based on the findings, we worked with Edrington to develop adaptation actions. The project guided Edrington to focus on resilience, emphasising their responsibility for the sustainability practices of their supply chain.

Delivering adaptive planning for South West Water

South West Water engaged us to address two key challenges: developing a robust metering investment plan and crafting an adaptive strategy for their WRMP24 and PR24 regulatory submissions. We applied our advanced adaptive planning algorithm to assess a wide range of viable projects over a 25-year horizon. Our objective was to identify three optimal plans: the least cost plan, the best value plan (factoring in monetised benefits like biodiversity and carbon), and the most socially and environmentally beneficial plan.

Using a “least regrets” approach, our algorithm enabled flexible, future-proof decision-making by incorporating pivot points and scenario analysis. This ensured South West Water could meet consumption targets, eliminate river extractions, and maintain a zero supply-demand deficit. 
Their submission was recognised by Ofwat as “outstanding” one of only two UK water companies to earn this rating, highlighting the critical role of adaptive planning and our expertise in delivering sustainable, cost-effective water infrastructure solutions.

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Estimating climate risks for the Climate Change Committee

In support of the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC’s) anticipated fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA4), we are leading two ‘deep dive’ projects to estimate the costs of climate risks and adaptation options across several sectors, including farming.

The first project tackles the potential risks to farming from water scarcity, while the second confronts risks from various temperature and rainfall effects, such as soil waterlogging and heat stress. 

  • Projections of climate risks, their societal impact and cost, and the cost and effectiveness of adaptation measures for water scarcity.
  • Projections of climate risks, their societal impact and cost, and the cost and effectiveness of adaptation measures for farmed landscapes. 

The initial requirement was to deliver a rapid review of existing work and analysis in this space. This included summarising existing models, data, and information that outline the costs of climate impacts on farmed landscapes and possible adaptation actions. The findings from this review have been used to refocus remaining project tasks.

Retrofitting Nature-based Solutions with Liverpool City Council

Liverpool City Council was awarded €3.4m over a 6-year period for a pioneering research and innovation-led project to demonstrate the impact of investment into retrofitting nature-based solutions within an urban environment. Urban Green-Up is an EU-funded initiative which set the challenge to develop, apply and validate a methodology for re-naturing urban spaces to mitigate the effects of climate change, improve air quality and water management, and increase sustainability.

We have been involved in the feasibility, design, and installation, identifying and developing a range of nature-based solutions to link strategic sites and increase biodiversity along corridors within the city. Interventions include green walls, floating ecosystems, sustainable drainage, tree planting and pollinator verges. A key aspect of the project was to monitor the multiple benefits of each intervention, and the data analysis has shown significant environmental, economic and social impacts.

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Are you on your journey to a sustainable future?

Wherever you are on your decarbonisation, climate resilience or nature-positive journey, we have the expertise to help you move forward with positive outcomes.

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Future Ready® is a registered trademark of WSP Global Inc. in Canada, Colombia, the United States and New Zealand. WSP Future Ready (logo)® is a registered trademark of WSP Global Inc. in Europe, Australia and the United Kingdom.