[Editor's note: This article was authored by BSR, a global business network and consultancy focused on sustainability.]

With managers across industries under pressure to develop sophisticated views about how climate change will impact their companies, it might seem natural to look to the insurance industry for guidance on how to act and communicate about risks and opportunities.

After all, with climate change threatening to increase the severity of humanitarian crises, economic disruptions, and weather-related disasters -- which, in the last half century, have cost more than a trillion dollars and killed more than 800,000 people (PDF) -- the insurance sector is being called on (PDF) to play a special role in helping society to adapt to climate change.

Unfortunately, even the insurance industry lacks the coveted crystal ball that would preview exactly how climate change will impact us. That's partly because prediction works by projecting future events based on past experiences, such as showing what the average distribution of the next thousand hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico might look like. Climate change variables can be factored in, but what to include and how much to adjust them remains largely guesswork.

Even if we had the parameters to guarantee more statistical accuracy, we would still be at the mercy of what matters most: low-probability, high-consequence events that happen once in a generation, such as this summer's heat wave in Russia and floods in Pakistan. Such outliers are hard to pinpoint in advance, yet these are precisely what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says business should be most worried about.

As a result, while climate science provides evidence of general trends, we are still a long way from being able to predict specific climate events. In lieu of precise predictions, a key to effectively managing the physical effects of climate change is preparedness, which can be achieved through developing literacy, identifying plausible impacts, evaluating priorities, and building resilience.

Developing Literacy

For business, developing literacy means understanding the mechanics by which climate change is likely to affect your company, and how to manage uncertainty.

In that sense, while climate change is expected to produce negative effects overall, there will also be important new societal needs related to climate change's direct effects on water, food, health, ecosystems, and coastal areas that businesses can focus on. These impacts can be thought of as both risks (your workforce becoming increasingly susceptible to disease) and opportunities (the chance to develop and distribute health-improving solutions).

Future climate impacts are a function of three things:

1. Impacts from today's climate, which may pose real risks, such as windstorms or floods, even if they haven't materialized
2. The potential effects of climate change, which could multiply those threats
3. Development paths that put more people and assets in harm's way

To develop expectations about total future impacts, business can use various techniques for characterizing the future, such as scenarios, storylines, analogues, qualitative projections, sensitivity analysis, and artificial experiments such as thought exercises. These all offer different tools. For example, analogues use past events to anticipate how communities will respond in the future, and storylines create narratives about how the company might logically evolve in response to climate-related economic trends.