The Case for TERA
As global megatrends continue to shape our world, they result in environmental impacts that affect businesses around the world. Companies become increasingly exposed to more extreme and frequent stresses and shocks such as flooding, resource scarcity, or new environmental regulations, that pose a direct threat to their operations. In order to secure business now and in the long-term, organizations need to find ways to identify and manage the risks stemming from those trends and events.
TERA has been designed to help with that. It is an assessment tool that evaluates the environmental resilience status of your company and/or individual sites. In doing so, TERA identifies the material environmental hazards that impact your business and assesses whether your company has taken appropriate action to mitigate or adapt to those. On the basis of an initial assessment, TERA helps to prioritize measures that your company can pursue to become more resilient to global megatrends.
The tool is flexible with regards to the various risks and hazards it considers and assesses, which makes it particularly suitable for alignment with global and industry standards, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). TERA is able to support you in tracking your progress against these standards as well as in formulating future action for enhanced goal contribution.
How it works
TERA introduces the concept of resilience demand and capacity. The resilience demand displays the potential impact that environmental stresses and shocks might have on your business, whereas the resilience capacity represents your company’s ability to anticipate, prevent, and react to this impact. TERA assesses both your company’s demand and capacity for resilience. In order to facilitate an assessment, TERA breaks global megatrends down into four main categories:
- Natural hazards (e.g. weather extremes, flooding, drought, seismic hazards)
- Resources (e.g. energy, water, waste, production resources)
- Environmental impacts (e.g. soil quality, air and water quality, biodiversity, ecosystem services)
- Socio-economic situation (e.g. urbanization, traffic, building contaminants, health & safety)
Clearly, different firms are exposed to different environmental risks, depending on the nature of the business and the location of sites. Therefore, when defining the scope of the assessment, we work together with you in order to determine those categories and sub-categories that are the most material to your business and operations.
For each of the selected categories, TERA assesses resilience demand and capacity individually, assigns scores, and weighs them against each other. As a result, the tool provides you with information on how environmentally resilient your business is with regards to different risks and threats. For each category, as well as for the overall site, the resilience status will be determined. In addition to that, the tool identifies areas of high priority, in which the implementation of measures is particularly urgent, thereby helping your business to create a focused set of follow-up actions. Based on the results of the initial assessment and identified resilience status, we will provide you with recommendations on how to secure your business today and in the near future.
Disclaimer
TERA assists you in managing environmental risks, reducing future costs and minimizing exposure to the impacts of global megatrends. The tool helps you to continuously improve the environmental resilience of your sites and prepare your business to adapt to and react upon the threats stemming from global megatrends.
