Skip to content
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
  • (408) 883-8053
  • [email protected]
Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
Menu
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
Resilic Logo
  • Products
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Learning Center
    • Special Reports
    • Events
  • Company
    • About
    • Partners
    • News
  • Contact
Menu
  • Products
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Learning Center
    • Special Reports
    • Events
  • Company
    • About
    • Partners
    • News
  • Contact
Resilic Logo
  • Products
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Learning Center
    • Special Reports
    • Events
  • Company
    • About
    • News
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
Menu
  • Products
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Learning Center
    • Special Reports
    • Events
  • Company
    • About
    • News
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
Menu
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
Resilic Logo
  • Products
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Learning Center
    • Special Reports
    • Events
  • Company
    • About
    • Partners
    • News
  • Contact
Menu
  • Products
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Learning Center
    • Special Reports
    • Events
  • Company
    • About
    • Partners
    • News
  • Contact
  • Products
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Learning Center
    • Special Reports
    • Events
  • Company
    • About
    • News
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Careers
  • Demo
  • Login
  • Customer Hub
  • Blog
  • In the News
  • Press Releases
Menu
  • Blog
  • In the News
  • Press Releases

Home / Blogs / Extreme weather’s impact on supply chains

Home / Extreme weather’s impact on supply chains

RESILINC BLOGS
Drought

Extreme weather’s impact on supply chains

Nov 30, 2021

Resilinc Editorial Team

Climate Change, Extreme Weather

Within a week of the COP26 conference wrapping up, massive floods in British Columbia severed the freight railroad serving the Vancouver, home of Canada’s largest port. The disruption has cut off a major trade route for Canada’s exports of minerals, wood fiber, food products, and other products to Asia, and it has created a supply chain nightmare for Canadian manufacturers. “We are chasing around North America trying to find other suppliers—at much higher rates,” the CEO of an Edmonton food manufacturer told the CBC.

The intense precipitation—one climatologist told Reuters that the rainfall amounts were more like “a tropical cyclone [than a] November [storm] in Canada”—comes after a year of extreme heat waves, droughts, and wildfires in North America and in many parts of the world.

Such extreme weather events are likely increasing in intensity and/or frequency due to climate change, and this trend points to the need for supply chain managers to begin to integrate the physical risks of climate change into their decisions about sourcing and supply network design.

An early warning of the gathering risks of drought and increased precipitation can be seen in Taiwan, where by April 2021, the worst drought in a half-century was threatening semiconductor production. Chip makers including world’s largest TSMC began contracting for water deliveries and sourcing groundwater from construction sites, and the government looked to speed up infrastructure projects to move water from the wet north of the island nation.

Then the drought eased in June, only to be followed by extreme rains, flooding, and landslides. And new climate modeling shows Taiwan will likely continue to suffer more droughts, less spring rain and more intense typhoons (although typhoons are expected to strike the island less frequently, a projection that highlights the sheer complexity of climate modeling).

The consensus among scientists is that a warming climate has already begun to make many droughts, heatwaves, floods, cold spells, and other extreme weather events more frequent
and/or more intense.

While not all extreme weather events can be blamed on climate change—many can. For example, the international climate science collaboration World Weather Attribution found that the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

In addition to extreme weather events, sea level rise is a major threat from climate change with the potential to inundate logistics infrastructure and even factories on low-lying coastland. For example, manufacturing and export megaregions Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Dongguan are all ranked by Verisk Maplecroft as among the most vulnerable regions in the world to coastal flooding exacerbated by rising seas.

The vulnerability of these three regions highlights the complexity of factoring climate change into sourcing decisions. Should companies that rely on suppliers in the Pearl River Delta shift their sourcing to safer regions? If so, when? Or do other factors such as the low costs, efficient logistics, and high-quality manufacturing available in these regions offset the growing risks of coastal flooding? And how can procurement managers evaluate the added resiliency their suppliers will gain when regional governments build new tidal gates, drainage systems and other infrastructure to adapt to rising seas?

One strategy to be considered is collaborating with suppliers to identify and mitigate weather-related risks that may increase with climate change. Some Resilinc customers have used their Resilinc supplier risk management tools to create standards for suppliers in hurricane zones and even agreed to pay more for raw materials in exchange for suppliers’ investing in risk-mitigation measures.

There are no easy answers to the questions raised by climate change, but they should figure larger in sourcing decisions in the coming years. Even if the pledges underlined at COP26 are aggressively fulfilled and global greenhouse gases begin to decline within a few decades, scientists say that it will take many more decades for the atmosphere to respond and for the climate to stabilize. In other words, climate change and the extreme weather it creates will be “normal” for many decades.

Resilinc Special Report on Global Drought Tracking

White Paper

Resilinc Special Report on Global Drought Tracking

Download Now

Recent Posts

Copper in flux

Hurricane proof your supply chain

Malaysia offers sourcing opportunities but with ESG concerns

Petrochemical demand is up and prices are spiking

Extreme weather is risky business for supply chains

China’s COVID policies fracture global supply chains

Securing aerospace and defense-critical supply chains

Post-pandemic, life sciences supply chains are prioritizing resilience

About Resilinc

We’re the world’s leading supply chain monitoring, mapping, and resiliency solution. Over 100k organizations partner with us to take their SCRM programs from reactive to resilient.
Request Demo

Recent Blogs

Loading...
Copper Image
Jun 21, 2022
3 MIN READ
Resilinc Editorial Team

Copper in flux

Less than four months ago, copper was setting record prices and experts were forecasting long-term...
Commodity management, Rare earth minerals
Extreme Weather
Jun 07, 2022
2 MIN READ
Resilinc Editorial Team

Hurricane proof your supply chain

If supply chain managers have time to organize a staff picnic this summer, they should...
BCP, Hurricane Preparedness, Hurricane season
Malaysia offers sourcing opportunities but with ESG concerns
May 31, 2022
3 MIN READ
Resilinc Editorial Team

Malaysia offers sourcing opportunitie...

As environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings become more important to global companies (see recent...
Regulatory compliance, Supply Chain Visibility
Read All Blogs

Who's in your supply chain?

Better visibility starts now

Email Now|Call Now|Chat Now

Receive Our Weekly Newsletter

Subscribe
Resilinc Transparent Logo

Most Trusted, Cognitive Supply Chain Risk Management Platform

Products

Blog

Career

  • Eventwatch
  • Riskshield
  • Supplier Capability Assessment
  • R Score
  • Business Continuity
  • CyberSCRM
Menu
  • Eventwatch
  • Riskshield
  • Supplier Capability Assessment
  • R Score
  • Business Continuity
  • CyberSCRM

Company

  • About
  • News
  • Events
Menu
  • About
  • News
  • Events

Resources

  • White Papers & Reports
  • Case Studies
  • On-Demand Webinars
Menu
  • White Papers & Reports
  • Case Studies
  • On-Demand Webinars

Follows Us

Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin
Sales: [email protected] Support: [email protected] Call us: (408) 883-8053
Resilinc Transparent Logo

Most Trusted, Cognitive Supply Chain Risk Management Platform

Company

  • About
  • News
  • Events
Menu
  • About
  • News
  • Events

Resources

  • White Papers & Reports
  • Case Studies
  • On-Demand Webinars
Menu
  • White Papers & Reports
  • Case Studies
  • On-Demand Webinars
  • Products
  • Blog
  • Careers
Menu
  • Products
  • Blog
  • Careers

Follows Us

Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin
Sales: [email protected]
Support: [email protected] Call us: (408) 883-8053

© 2022 Resilinc Corporation. All rights reserved.

Data Security

Privacy Policy

Resilinc Special Report

Resilinc Special Report: Rare Earth Supply Chain Disruptions: Impacts to the High-Tech Industry

Download Now