Organizational Climate Risk Assessment - Massachusetts

Challenge

The evolving climate landscape presents complex challenges to organizations’ facilities and operations, such as building damage, power outages, and network disruptions. With eight Departments under the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development (LWD) operating across 35 statewide facilities, LWD needed assistance evaluating climate-related physical and operational risks and developing strategies to ensure their continuity of services.

Solutions

TRC utilized a two-prong approach to assess organizational climate risk:

• Identified LWD facilities potentially at risk to climate-related hazards, under recent and future conditions, including extreme heat; heavy precipitation; urban, riverine, and coastal flooding; extreme storm events and strong winds; extreme cold; wildfires; tornadoes; and winter weather. Our analysis identified which facilities are at greatest risk to future conditions and documented risk reduction measures already occurring at facilities.
• Evaluated climate induced risks associated with the daily operations, critical functions, and internal systems of each LWD Department. We conducted a series of interviews with Department staff and a comprehensive review of existing written programs across the Executive Office to assess its policies, plans and organizational structure. From this effort, we identified a number of climate-related risks across facilities and departments and developed a suite of climate adaptation strategies to address those risks. Strategies ranged from building inspections and improvements to network fortification and diversifying communication methods.

Results

At the completion of the project, TRC produced an Adaptation Strategy Roadmap and Implementation Tracker—a living document that prioritizes adaptation strategies based on LWD’s most immediate and consequential climate-related risks. Strategies include a detailed implementation process which provides cost estimates, time horizons and actionable mitigation steps. The tracker can be adjusted for each strategy in real-time to reflect progress, limitations, barriers, or opportunities that may arise. Successful implementation of the Roadmap will result in continuity of LWD’s business operations ensuring critical labor and workforce services are provided to citizens across the Commonwealth.

In January 2024, TRC won a Climate Change Business Journal Award for the Advancing Best Practices: Climate Change Adaptation & Resilience category in recognition of the groundbreaking methodologies used during this project to assess potential risk and tailor a climate adaptation strategy to LWD’s facilities and operations.