14 Feb Session Preview: Intelligence Paradigm | Improving Your Climate Security Resilience

By Lana Djurkin-König
Group Head of Corporate Security/ Chief Security Office
Swiss Re

The word of the day is #polycrisis. It has been popularized in Davos and it aims to describe the simultaneous and overlapping crises facing the world today: a health crisis, a mounting climate crisis, a war in Europe, energy and inflation crisis, cost of living crisis and so on. All of them are leading to mounting security issues with severe consequences like fragile states, rising poverty, hunger, violent protests, political instability and even state collapse. And all of them are interconnected.

In 2022, emerging out of COVID crisis, world woke up in geo-political tensions that escalated into war in Ukraine, that is still on going. The economic overhang of the pandemic and the ongoing war make it difficult to ensure a coordinated and sufficiently rapid approach to global challenges—most notably climate change. Last year was the hottest year in a row of the last 8 years. It was in ways a wakeup call to all that there is an urgent need for collaboration and innovation on climate change as an existential risk. Record heatwaves and droughts in key markets highlighted critical and emerging risks and vulnerabilities in critical national infrastructure as well as operational resilience.

Energy supply disruption through loadshedding, or transport disruption through points failure are commonplace today, but we in Corporate Security must begin to map, qualify, quantify and mitigate new risks from climate change that can and potentially will include more frequent and impactful business disruption at key location and across critical processes, higher economic and insured losses from natural hazards, more regular outbreaks spanning the human-animal-environmental interface impacting workplace absenteeism or supply chain risk, to name a few. As Security professionals, it is incumbent on us to design, develop and deliver programmes that will protect and sustain our organisations, societies and way of life. This is a ‘Moonshot’ moment for the Security sector, where a failure to collaborate and innovate is on no-one’s best interests and the best minds can contribute to achieving the unthinkable.

Jane Goodall, in her book “The book of Hope” says that hope is often misunderstood. “People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking – I hope something will happen, but I am not going to do anything about it”. According to her this is opposite of hope that requires actions and engagement. Actively building resilience is one of those actions we can all take – as security professionals for our corporations what translates for the society as a whole.

In this session we will discuss how threats are interconnected; how intelligence powers resilience and how is ESG a way forward.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Lana Djurkin-König and Inge Huijbrechts’ session takes place on Thursday 23 March at 14.00. To join this session, register for your leadership pass