Global corporations operating across multiple continents have poured resources into understanding exactly how floods, bushfires and heatwaves threaten their operations, and the result is a mature ecosystem of frameworks, checklists and compliance regimes built specifically to manage that exposure.
Australia’s own Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB) climate disclosure regime now sits alongside international mechanisms such as the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) baseline, the UK’s Sustainability Disclosure Requirements and Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, all requiring listed and larger companies to separate their climate exposure into short-term threats like sudden storms and long-term threats such as sustained temperature rises, then show regulators precisely how they are responding to each.
This is not simply a reporting exercise for the compliance department. Under AASB requirements, a business must demonstrate the practical engineering and operational controls it has in place, from drainage systems that prevent flash flooding damage to structural reinforcements that protect a facility during a bushfire event. Those same field-level actions double as the evidence that satisfies frameworks such as CDP – which assesses the quality of a company’s environmental disclosure, including data, targets, risks and governance – and EcoVadis, which evaluates the strength of a company’s management systems, based on documented policies, actions and controls, when it comes to proving genuine business continuity planning.
Small and medium businesses, by contrast, rarely have a sustainability team translating physical risk into formal documentation and also rarely have the AASB threshold obligations that force the exercise in the first place. The result is that many SMEs have done little beyond hoping the next severe weather event misses them.
Where the exposure really sits
A facilities manager or cleaning contractor without a documented severe weather plan is not just risking downtime, they are risking the safety of frontline staff who are often the first people on-site when a storm hits or the last to leave when a heatwave grips a warehouse floor. Workforce protection measures, such as adjusting shift patterns during extreme heat or providing appropriate protective equipment during smoke events, are treated by larger organisations as core occupational health and safety obligations tied directly to standards like GRI 403, yet in the SME sector these same measures are frequently informal or entirely absent.
Supply chain fragility compounds the problem further. Where big business builds resilience through back-up suppliers, prearranged alternative logistics routes and documented procurement risk assessments, a smaller operator with a single supplier and no contingency plan can be forced out of action by one storm hundreds of kilometres away. None of this requires the budget of a multinational to fix, and that is precisely the point worth making to SME owners who assume disaster planning is only for large enterprises with dedicated risk teams.
A practical starting point for SMEs
Adopting even a simplified version of the short-term and long-term risk separation used in AASB and ISSB reporting gives SME owners a structured way to think about exposure without needing a compliance department. Short-term actions may include clearing drains, securing loose equipment and establishing an emergency communication plan, while long-term actions may involve reviewing insurance coverage, reinforcing building envelopes and building relationships with back-up suppliers in different regions.
Preparing for extreme weather is no longer a luxury reserved for organisations with the resources to commission formal risk audits. ISSA’s Sustainability Committee is currently completing a Handbook on Preparing for Extreme Weather Events, which is specifically designed to help members of the global cleaning industry prepare to protect their physical assets, their people and their customers.
Australian SMEs that begin documenting even basic weather response measures will find themselves better protected operationally, and better positioned if larger clients or insurers begin asking harder questions about resilience further down the track.
