Given the unprecedented year we’ve had, lots of organisations are thinking much more seriously about risks and contingencies. What can you feed in to risk assessments or your organisation’s risk register, from a sustainability perspective?

Build on what's already there

What does your organisation already do, to understand and manage its risks?

Perhaps someone in the senior leadership team, board of directors or trustees is formally responsible for risks.
Maybe your organisation already has an assessment of its mission-critical or business-critical processes or areas of operation? If this assessment already exists, then you can look at each element and use your knowledge of sustainability issues to ask “what sustainability risks are there to this critical element?”
There may be a formal risk register, or a section of its annual report which covers risks.

And the organisation may be updating and reassessing risk, given the year we've had.

What might the mission-critical areas be?

Depending on the kind of organisation it is, and the goods or services it supplies, mission-critical things may include:

digital infrastructure including online shops, internal communications, databases,
priority parts of its supply chain,
logistics, staff or customer transport,
legal requirements which might lead to rapid shut-down if breached,
brand and reputation.

For example, if reliable delivery of particular supplies is mission-critical, what sustainability issues might pose a risk to this: extreme weather (e.g. flooding)? supplier closure because of the discovery of human rights breaches? failure of crops?

Overlay sustainability issues

If you already have a strong analysis of the main sustainability issues for your organisation, it may be easy to reframe them as risks which need managing. Alternatively, use a robust framework like the UN Sustainable Development Goals / Global Goals as a starting point.

Making the Path by Walking

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