Just Resilience in a Warming World: Heat, Worker Safety, and Investor Action on Climate Risk

As climate change accelerates, rising temperatures, flooding, and other physical climate impacts are creating material risks for workers, companies, investors, and communities. Extreme and chronic heat are emerging as particularly urgent threats, affecting worker health and safety, productivity, business continuity, supply chains, and long-term economic value. These risks are not distributed evenly, making Just Resilience—ensuring that workers and vulnerable communities have the resources and protections needed to adapt—a critical lens for investors assessing climate risk.

This session will explore how climate-related physical risks translate into human capital and business risks, including work stoppages, absenteeism, injury-related costs, legal liability, reputational exposure, and operational disruption across direct operations and global supply chains. It will also examine how workers, asset owners, investment managers, and companies are responding—from improving workplace protections and disclosure to incorporating climate risk into investment mandates and stewardship priorities.

Panelists will discuss practical ways investors can evaluate corporate oversight and management of heat and broader climate-related workforce risks, engage companies on worker safety and resilience, and identify strategies that protect both people and long-term portfolio value. By the end of the session, participants will better understand why occupational climate risk is an emerging investor and human rights concern, what questions to ask companies, and how climate resilience can be integrated into investment decision-making.

This in-depth session will explore insights from two research partnerships:

• The Global Labor Institute at Cornell University and Schroders Asset Management’s report: “Engaging with companies on Just Resilience: An Investor Toolkit”

• NRDC and Trillium Asset Management’s report: “Rising Temperatures, Rising Risks: An Investor Guide to Heat Hazards and Worker Safety”

It will also bring in perspectives from other stakeholders: union/labor, corporate and asset owner. This extended 90 minute session will feature both a panel of experts, and additional time for a more interactive workshop.