Climate resilience
Natural hazards resource hub
expands Zurich’s focus on severe weather events
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
That’s a famous old joke (perhaps erroneously attributed to Mark Twain). These days, however, facing the challenges of an increasingly volatile climate, it’s harder to find the humor in the statement.
While no one can control the weather, communities and businesses do need to do something about it — namely working to mitigate the potential impacts of severe weather events ahead of time, preparing for actions to take when those events are imminent, planning how to respond when an event occurs, and having a recovery strategy in place to get businesses and institutions back in operation.
Zurich has always seen our role as not merely providing insurance coverage for natural hazards, but also providing resilience guidance for our customers. With climate change resulting in more frequent and severe catastrophic weather events, this is more essential than ever.
Our Programs insurance and services serve a wide variety of property and construction businesses — the most obvious kinds of operations at risk from natural hazards, but far from the only ones. Any business with offices, facilities, storage areas or even employees working onsite at properties they don’t own or manage needs to be prepared for severe weather events and other natural hazards. And, with the volatility previously mentioned, that preparation can’t be based solely on the region where a business is located. Major storms can happen anywhere, and wildfires are occurring more frequently in some areas where they used to be comparatively rare. As proven by the deadly winter storm and associated power outages that struck Texas last February, even threats from snow and cold weather can hit areas not known for them.
Recently, Zurich North America launched several sections of a natural hazards resource hub on its website that will expand in later months to address other hazards. Each of the hazard-specific sections includes a multi-article emergency management guide for businesses at the top of the page. These helpful guides were developed in consultation with Zurich’s Risk Engineering team. Additional articles and resources related to each hazard are also available directly under the emergency management guide on each hub. Collectively, these resources are another way we are always working to help businesses manage risk effectively.
The emergency management guide on our Hurricane Resource Hub features articles on mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. You will also find tools like our Hurricane Toolkit for Construction, an article on water damage prevention, a storm surge infographic and much more. Find our hurricane hub here:
Our Wildfire Resource Hub’s emergency management guide includes mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery advice, along with an overview on wildfire basics and why the risks of these destructive blazes are growing. Additional resources include insightful Post-Event Review Capability (PERC) reports on recent major wildfires, articles on business resilience strategies and more. Find our wildfire hub here:
Our Convective Storm Resource Hub covers the associated perils of severe thunderstorms. The emergency management guide for this hub features articles on mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery actions for tornado, lightning and hail risks. Additional resources are being added to the hub as of this writing. Find our convective storm hub here:
Zurich has always made natural hazard resources available to customers, distributors and the public at large, but having these hazard-specific hubs, with the emergency management guides front and center, is part of a push for even more robust knowledge hubs and more efficient ways of sharing pertinent content.
As Mike Widdekind, Technical Director –Property, for Risk Engineering at Zurich North America explained, “We have so much helpful information, it’s important that we get it in the right hands in a timely fashion.”
Within Programs, Zurich is always looking for avenues to help customers protect themselves from existing and evolving weather-related risks. We do this through offerings such as our catastrophic property insurance programs and via informative webinars, our ZProgramsMatch emails, and of course, in content in this publication featuring resources we hope Program Administrators will share with customers.
Our natural hazards resource hub will soon feature additional sections on flood response and winter weather hazards and safety guidance.
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7 PROGRAM LEADER