Climate risk : how to protect your business over the long term

With the increasing intensity of extreme weather events, businesses need to be able to prevent and adapt. MMA is committed to prevention and is here to help you manage these new risks.

Increasingly frequent and costly natural events

The climate is changing - causing drought, storms, hail and flooding - and its effects on the economy can already be seen. According to France Assureurs, natural disasters cost French insurance providers around €5 billion in 2024. This record amount is mainly due to storms early in the season, severe winds and flash floods in densely populated areas.
Some regions are particularly at risk and businesses located in flood-prone areas, on clay soil or close to forests are becoming increasingly vulnerable. France Assureurs states that more than 20,000 municipalities in France are at risk of flooding. For businesses in these areas, the consequences of a weather event can be significant, resulting in shutdowns, lost output and damage to stock and sensitive equipment.

Climate change will have a lasting effect on this risk

Climate change is real. According to the Météo France weather service and the IPCC, heatwaves now occur at least five times more often than in the last century. France’s National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (PNACC-3), published in 2024, warns that temperatures could rise by up to 4°C between now and 2100, resulting in extreme weather events that are more intense, more sudden and harder to anticipate.
However, climate risk does not just cause material damage. The shift towards a low-carbon economy also introduces new constraints, such as changes in standards, a gradual ban on certain practices and the transformation of value chains. For company executives, it is now a matter of managing both the physical risks (such as flooding, fire, drought) and the transition risks (such as regulations, reputation, assets becoming obsolete).

Major risks: MMA is here to support businesses

At MMA, we know that protecting your business means first and foremost understanding the risks and being able to anticipate these risks. That is why the Covéa Group – of which MMA is part – has created the Weather and Major Hazards department, made up of climatologists, engineers, geomatics experts, data scientists and actuaries. Their role is to model climate hazards, assess vulnerabilities and come up with concrete solutions to prevent this risk.
 

These solutions include:

• Climate risk mapping to identify sites at risk of flooding, storms, hail, etc.
• Business continuity plans to ensure businesses remain resilient in the event of a crisis.
• Technical solutions such as keeping stocks higher up, flood protection and relocating sensitive equipment.
• Innovative tools such as Coventéo and Covisiomap to visualise and anticipate the hazards to which your premises are exposed.
• Weather warnings to anticipate hazards and take appropriate measures to protect your business as best possible.

Prevent in order to protect

Increased exposure to climate hazards can affect underwriting terms and policy renewals. Insurers now expect businesses to analyse, prevent and make themselves less vulnerable.
The good news is that prevention is a powerful way of ensuring that your business remains insurable, controlling costs and securing its operations.

Essential for the future

Protecting your business against climate change is no longer optional. It is a strategic, economic and regulatory requirement. 

While it seems inevitable that the number of natural disasters will increase over the coming years, preventive diagnostic solutions are available for implementing a crisis management policy, thereby limiting the effects on small and medium-sized businesses. MMA helps you to turn these challenges into opportunities to improve your resilience and performance.

Contact your MMA advisor to arrange a vulnerability assessment, devise an adaptation plan or get tailor-made support.

Charles Dumartinet, Major Risk Manager at COVÉA, explains “the Major Risk division at COVÉA – which is made up of climatologists, forecasters, engineers, developers, geomatics engineers and actuaries – develops models to assess losses due to natural disasters, which then enables us to deploy comprehensive solutions to improve risk management across all our business lines.”

Assessment and prevention – the solution to mitigate risks

Once the danger has been assessed, you must put in place measures to bolster your resilience. Our role as an insurance provider is to help you better understand the risks your company faces by considering the exposure of your facilities to certain hazards. We have developed a number of solutions, such as Coventéo and Covisiomap, to provide risk managers with analysis tools to prepare how the company would manage a particular crisis. If their factory is located in a flood risk area, inventories should be raised to account for the potential of rising water, and IT servers should not be installed on the ground floor. Protective measures, such as cofferdams, serve to stop water from entering the premises.

Similarly, bad weather alerts help to anticipate danger and put in place appropriate measures to safeguard the business as effectively as possible.

Although it seems unavoidable that the world will experience more and more natural disasters in the coming years, we offer a range of prevention solutions to enable you to develop a crisis management strategy and therefore mitigate the impact on your medium-sized company.