Following a year on unprecedented occurrence of natural disasters causing hundreds of billions of pounds in property damage worldwide, FM Global has announced the launch of the FM Global NatHaz Toolkit, an online resource for natural hazard planning.

Though predictive science is improving, natural hazards continue to pose great threats to facilities, equipment and productivity simply because the when, where and severity of any natural hazard occurrence can change sharply and often without warning. FM Global’s NatHaz toolkit includes four sections dedicated to understanding the hazards associated with earthquake, flood, freeze and windstorm. Each section includes a variety of loss prevention education material, including podcasts, brochures and checklists, on protecting property from natural catastrophe.

The free toolkit comes at a time of increased frequency of natural catastrophes, with a higher number of companies being affected due to their complex and multi-tier supply chains. The Thailand floods and Japan Tsunami last year have led to supply chain risk becoming a high priority concern for businesses.

A recent FM Global survey looked at what supply chain risks companies would face in China if there were a disaster there of the scale of the Japan tsunami. The survey showed that financial executives of multi-national corporations are extremely concerned about the impact of supply chain disruptions in China, and agree that firms must be more diligent in addressing their exposures in the region. The study underscores the fact that supply chains in the region are more likely to face business disruption by a natural disaster, particularly as China has not yet fully embraced many of the risk management practices followed in Europe and the United States.

China is not the only region in which companies need to be more diligent about protecting themselves from natural disasters. Given the increasing popularity of outsourcing functionality internationally, businesses need to be aware that interdependent risks can have severe financial consequences in global supply chains. Firms must therefore undertake proactive measures, such as finding several sources of supply to prevent themselves from being dependent on a single source that could be adversely affected by a natural disaster.

“We believe that the majority of all loss is preventable and that businesses need to ensure they are properly prepared in order to be resilient," says Stefano Tranquillo, vice-president and operations manager, Northern Europe Operations. "The information provided in our NatHaz toolkit will help ensure property risks are only a distraction, not a disaster, for companies with exposure to natural catastrophes.”

Click here to download the toolkit

Share Story: