Across the globe, communities are grappling with constrained budgets, limited staff / resources and new social-economic challenges. Those pressures are compounded by the changing climate-driven hazards that strain emergency response systems and accelerate the degradation of aging infrastructure that was never designed for today’s climate realities, let alone tomorrows.
While climate resilience is a national challenge, given the impacts of extreme weather are felt locally, it’s often hard for community leaders to know where to start or what to tackle first. The Liberty Mutual Climate Transition Center shared our physical risk insights and climate resiliency expertise to the paper “Resilience by Design: Strategic Actions for Climate Adaptation,” developed by the global nonpartisan organization Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center. The paper provides an easy to follow framework to allow for meaningful action for communities to take today.
The Additional Impacts to Communities
The consequences of climate events extend well beyond immediate threats to life and property. Physical damage disrupts local economies by forcing business closures, interrupting supply chains, displacing workers and reducing tax revenues that fund public services, further eroding a community’s fiscal resilience and its ability to invest in physical risk prevention and recovery.
Taken together, these dynamics leave many communities caught in a cycle — increasing exposure and vulnerability, rising recovery costs, and diminished capacity to reinvest in preparedness and long-term resilience. That reality makes strategic prioritization, cross-sector collaboration and creative financing not just desirable, but essential for leaders who must protect lives, sustain local economies and preserve social cohesion in a rapidly changing environment.
The Atlantic Council’s framework provides community policymakers and leaders with practical, actionable steps to take today to foster resilient communities long-term:
- Consider land use and protect natural assets: Prioritize nature-based solutions to reduce disaster intensity and mitigate long-term climate risk.
- Adopt climate-responsive building codes: Stronger codes minimize damage, accelerate recovery, and save lives - particularly when updated to reflect future risk projections, not only historical data.
- Develop and disclose community resilience plans: Partner with community members, first responders and businesses to create plans that attract resilience investments.
- Build post-disaster recovery plans: Design recovery frameworks with multi-stakeholder consultation that facilitate swift responses to minimize losses.
- Engage community support through education: Equip residents with resources and training to avoid costly delays in decision making.
Why Liberty Champions Climate Resiliency
While mitigation remains critical, as a property and casualty insurer we believe it must be paired with resiliency, so the built environment can withstand the impacts science shows are already locked into our future.
Liberty Mutual defines climate resiliency as the ability to prepare for, adapt to and recover from the physical impacts of climate change. It’s a topic we’ve been championing for years and is a key pillar of our climate strategy. By leveraging our risk expertise, we aim to advance the fortification of the built environment, help individuals and individuals and communities increase preparedness for natural hazard events, and increase engagement and support for resiliency efforts.
As communities seek to implement climate resiliency measures, insurance can be an important partner. Decades of experience leveraging data around hazards and perils equip us with insight and resources to help our customers mitigate risk and confidently explore potential opportunities. But helping our customers and communities be better prepared to withstand adverse events is something one business or industry can do on their own. That’s why Liberty Mutual regularly collaborates through public and private partnerships with peers, government entities and others – like the Atlantic Council – to collectively focus on building a more resilient future.
We’re excited to start seeing a greater emphasis on climate resiliency from a policy, financing and community perspective. The insurance industry is very supportive of this shift, as we have known for some time that investing in resiliency saves lives, property, and communities.
