Commentary: This Year’s Hurricane Season Was the Costliest Ever. Now What?
This post was originally published on November 30, 2017 in Fortune. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria have created the costliest hurricane season to date, but this is also part of a trend of increasing frequency of billion-dollar weather disasters. And it’s creating a stark reality for American companies today. As large-scale disasters become more common, businesses must do more to invest in disaster preparedness beyond their own infrastructure and business continuity plans. The new normal requires business leaders to invest in the resilience of the communities in which they operate. This is not just a moral necessity. Spending on community resilience is also a sound business decision. Take the pharmaceutical industry for instance. About 50 pharmaceutical plantsoperated by some of the largest drug companies in the world are located in Puerto Rico. All must now manage a major broken link in their supply chains—the loss of major manufacturing capacity due to the painfully slow recovery process on the island in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. At the same time, news reports have indicated that
