Study: Three quarters of UK businesses feel threatened by climate crisis

Three quarters of UK businesses feel threatened by the climate crisis, yet only one in 10 have undertaken climate risk assessments and regard the issue as a priority, a news study from Earth Science AI company Cervest has revealed.

A survey of more than 500 UK businesses published today by the London-based start-up has revealed a major gap between corporate awareness of the dangers posed by climate change and in-house action to address the escalating risks.

The poll reveals that 60 per cent of companies in the UK are concerned that climate change will prove damaging for their business.

Yet just one in 10 businesses confirmed that they were assessing climate risk as a priority, while an overwhelming majority of businesses surveyed - 72 per cent - said they saw climate as a 'political problem'.

Iggy Bassi, founder and chief executive of Cervest, said: "Our findings show that businesses are unclear of the risks that climate presents to them, and the potential price tag that goes with that. Bearing the brunt of this current pandemic will be an immediate focus for many companies. But the long term cost of ignoring climate change threatens to be far more severe than the expense of putting strategies in place today." 

Nearly half of respondents said that cost was the main obstacle for their failure to formally assess climate risks, while 28 per cent pointed to a lack of understanding of the topic.

Nearly two thirds of companies said they lacked staff with the right skill set to address climate risks.

Furthermore, more than four in five organisations said they felt the government was failing to provide adequate support to help them tackle climate risks, while 85 per cent said they were in favour of regulation that mitigates climate risk.

The survey results comes a few months after Cervest revealed it would be collaborating with the Alan Turing Institute on a machine learning solution that provides organisations and communities in data-scarce regions with better insights into their exposure to climate change and extreme weather events.

Bassi said at the time that the collaboration could help improve the economy's long-term resilience. "With The Alan Turing Institute, we want to use this new, cost effective methodology and technology to help communities and organisations quickly understand more about their land-based assets and how it will change in the future to ensure informed and timely decisions," he said.

He added that it was "exciting to be pioneers of Multiresolution Multitask Learning Modelling" alongside the UK's national institute for data science and aritificial intelligence. "We look forward to seeing the valuable impact this will have on communities all over the world," he said.

The project, which will initially focus on crop yield forecasting and remote sensing data, relies on 'Multiresolution Multitask Learning Models' that create high resolution images of areas of land by integrating information and evidence from multiple resolutions across space and through time.

With this information, the partners explained, organisations and communities globally will be able to quantify how climate impacts should inform national infrastructure decisions.  Not only will they be able to understand and predict what is happening to the world around them, but they will be able to identify how it impacts them "on a unique, personalised level", the organisations said.

Eventually, the plan is for Multiresolution Multitask Learning Models to be transferred to other asset categories and help measure the causes and impacts of climatic and extreme events on a wide range of sectors.

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