Climate Crisis Safety Guide (2/5): How to develop a climate resilience plan

A good start to planning climate resilience for a news organisation is to understand what updates are necessary in the context of a disaster.

Safety and contingency protocols are essential for journalistic teams to be able to act in disaster scenarios. The following five-step cycle, organised by the US Climate Resilience Toolkit and detailed below, aims to help structure a climate resilience plan in organisations.  

Although it may seem complex, this plan can be adapted to media outlets of different sizes and realities.

Check out the step-by-step guide:

1 – First step

• Structure the team: who will be the leader (or leaders) and which team will be responsible for creating this plan, if possible, people from different areas.
  

2 – Understand the exposure

• Create an inventory of everything your office needs to continue functioning in the event of extreme events, physical assets,  infrastructure, and people. 
• List disasters that have already occurred and those that are likely to occur in the future, such as floods, fires, and flooding. Important: local scientists usually already have this mapped out. 
• Now create a MATRIX: in a spreadsheet, the left column lists the items necessary for the organisation to function and the top column lists the disaster risks. In each cell, answer whether that resource could be affected by that risk. 

3 – Assess vulnerabilities and risks 

• Assess the greater or lesser vulnerability of each resource based on its sensitivity to a particular disaster and its ability to adapt. 
• Create a spreadsheet with the resources in the first column and, in the following columns, potential impact, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability. Describe the potential impact of each risk on the resource and classify the above items as high, medium, or low.

4 – Investigate options  

• Based on the risks and vulnerabilities you have mapped, compile a list of strategies that could reduce them. 
• Analysing past extreme events can help reveal potential solutions.
• Based on the current and future reality of your vehicle, assess the consequences of implementing each of the strategies. Classify them as feasible, potentially feasible, or not feasible.

5 – Prioritise and plan 

• For each action you believe is possible to implement, evaluate the items below and only proceed with actions that have positive answers: 
  • • Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Which professionals need to be involved?
    • What is the cost-benefit ratio? Estimate the value of having reduced risk or a more resilient scenario and other benefits. 
    • What are the associated financial costs? Is the value of these benefits comparable to or greater than the cost of implementing the project? 

6 – Take action 

• Communicate the actions clearly to the rest of the organisation. If any of the solutions do not fit the previously mapped objectives, it is always possible to change them. Just don’t get discouraged!

Access the full version of the Climate Crisis Safety Guide for journalists in Portuguese.