Doing Business In A Changing Climate
Written by: Reneé Claire Blanchard
I first wrote about his topic in 2019 to discuss the constant flooding in New Orleans and its impact on our small business community. It feels as though I might be writing about the topic for years to come. I haven’t quite had the words to sort it all out before. I’m not entirely sure that I do now, but I know that this is the direction my work must take. Doing business in a changing climate.
While working on environmental issues in my first career, I challenged big businesses like Dell and Apple to eliminate toxic chemicals from their products. Those campaigns did a lot of good and still impact the products we bring home. Now as I run a very small local business, a cafe, in an area that is the poster child for climate change in the United States, I look at climate change in a new way. In a very personal way.
Climate change is here. My shop floods often, our trash isn’t getting picked up because local millionaires refuse to pay a living wage or provide protective gear during a pandemic, our utilities barely work, the utility rates continue to increase as they fail, and a hurricane that moved from a Category 2 to Category 4 within 48 hours just hit my community, eliminating the ability for a mandatory evacuation. Our small businesses in New Orleans, and in other places like ours that are seeing environmental crisis after crisis, know that we are indeed already doing business in a changing climate. Climate change is here at our doorsteps today. So how do we keep our businesses open?
How do we keep doing business when our local, state, and federal government aren’t up to the task of protecting our communities in the face of climate change? How do we keep doing business when there is no political will to stabilize our infrastructure in the climate we see today, much less the changes we are expected to survive in the future? How do we keep serving our customers and paying our bills when we don’t know if the rain cloud moving past us will simply water our plants or flood our cars and close our shop?
I think as small businesses we need a three prong approach. I’m calling it; A Healthy You, A Healthy Business, and A Healthy Community approach. Long winded? Maybe. While small business is rooted in families providing needed services and products to their immediate community, we are now faced with becoming bigger leaders in how our society navigates climate change.
A Healthy You - We must take care of our mind, body and spirit when facing the stress of climate change. We need to make sure we prioritize our physical and mental health. Seeing our limited control slip away with each flood, each utility and city service outage, and each large storm that rolls through, we feel the stress compound on top of us or we begin to disengage completely. During this past month since Hurricane Ida, I had to dig deep into my healthiest habits and routines. Move daily. Eat plenty of vegetables. Drink so much water. Talk to people who care about me. And I still felt paralyzed and overwhelmed. Many small business owners are hustling because with the unexpected climate comes unexpected expenses and needs of those that count on us. We need to remember to prioritize ourselves too. Take a break. Go for a walk. Look at your daily tasks and see what you can delegate or set aside for another time. Our business plan must include physical and mental health.
A Healthy Business - We need to empower ourselves and those businesses we work with to be strong and flexible. It is clear our city, state, and federal governments are not up to the task of handling a changing climate. While scientists have been talking about climate change for over forty years, our government and business communities have done very little. Or worse, many have purposely made us more vulnerable by contributing to misinformation and ignoring the environmental impacts of their business. Now we need to think smaller. We need to get better informed about how our local climate works. What streets flood more often? How types of weather impact our business in what ways? We also need to get more prepared. How can we change our services and products to be more climate change resilient? Many of us pivoted our businesses throughout the pandemic, that is the same type of innovation we have to take to move us forward as our climate begins to change even more drastically. To have a healthier business in a changing climate, we also need to advocate for ourselves and our communities. What utilities and services are being neglected due to weather and climate issues? What can the small business community do about it? How can we put pressure on decision makers together? How can we move past the bad actors within our own industry? Should we create new industry associations that make better decisions on climate change?
A Healthy Community - In the days and weeks after Hurricane Ida, it wasn’t the city that fed the people, it was mutual aid groups. It was restaurants emptying their unpowered fridges and cooking outside handing meals to their neighbors. In the face of climate change this is no longer just a nice thing to do, this is essential. Our small businesses need to figure out ways to strengthen our community’s response as storms worsen. We need to be leaders in creating sustainable systems that keep our community’s safe storm after storm. What local mutual aid can you business build relationships with? In what ways can your business strengthen your community when climate change hits? This should be part of our business plan moving forward.
Doing business in a changing climate must be a 360 view of how and who our business benefits the most. We need to think smaller and more systematically. We need to be prepared and learn to be more flexible. No community is safe from climate change. It will just look different. New Orleans and South Louisiana have become experts in a few things. We focus on the community, we know what to do when the lights go out, and we know how to keep each other safe during and after a storm. But now we all have to think deeper. We need to build those safety nets specifically to combat the damage climate change is doing to our community. No business is safe in the face of climate change, but those with small cash reserves are the most vulnerable.
Four things to work on right now:
Build a relationship with a mutual aid group. Work with this group year around. All of our communities have needs right now, not just during a crisis. Find a way that your business can assist this group each week or month. If you build the relationship and ability to give now, when a crisis does happen, you will have a network to plug into immediately.
Cash reserves. Those with cash in hand will be better able to get back up and running once the crisis is over. Review your monthly expenses. Figure out what amount of cash you need access to in case you are shut down for a month. Make a plan on how you will be able to access that amount of cash.
Insurance. Make sure you have enough insurance for your business in case you lose power or access to doing business for an extended amount of time. Make sure you understand your insurance policies.
Mental Health Care. Make sure your business provides access to mental health care for your employees. In New Orleans many restaurants have partnered with We Help Nola, my business included. For a small fee, this organization provides a certain number of mental health care appointments and discounts on physical health class and services. Our communities are struggling right now and as leaders we must be able to provide what we can to help those that run our businesses.
