From the Arctic storm that blasted Texas in February to the 50ºC heatwave that seared the Mediterranean all summer, extreme meteorological events are .

From the Arctic storm that blasted Texas in February to the 50ºC heatwave that seared the Mediterranean all summer, extreme meteorological events are undeniably growing in both frequency and intensity.

The conversation about technology and climate has so far been dominated by talk of carbon footprints. We’ve heard much about the CO2 emissions of data centres and the fact that bitcoin mining requires more energy each year than the total consumed by the whole of Argentina. Although extreme weather is becoming increasingly hard to ignore, what tends to be discussed less in the ICT industry is that climate-driven events run both ways.

In July, for instance, flooding after extreme rainfall not only caused fatalities across Europe. It also brought down Germany’s three main mobile networks, disabling more than 130 base stations in the country’s western states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate.

Back in 2005, a heroic effort by a team led by special forces veteran Michael Barnett to keep a data centre operational during and after Hurricane Katrina meant that New Orleans kept a line to the outside world, even as cell towers were being destroyed by wind and water. In that case, maintaining communications was literally a matter of life and death. Telecoms providers learnt several key lessons from Katrina, with those affected having since reduced their reliance on physical locations. Many players now have their own crisis teams, for instance, which can be deployed to disaster zones to establish emergency comms.

Nonetheless, a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in August about the extent of climate risk suggests that potentially devastating weather-related incidents will become ever more common.

From an infrastructural perspective, this is particularly worrying because key systems are so closely connected, according to Chris Cartwright, chair of the digital panel at the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

“A power outage could bring down both a transport network and a communications system, for instance. It could also affect local hospitals and schools,” he explains. “This is the real concern: to what extent do you create interoperability, knowing that a single point of failure could knock out many services?”

Luis Neves is CEO of the Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GESI), which works with multinational ICT firms and other large organisations to provide impartial guidance and resources for “achieving integrated social and environmental sustainability through ICT-enabled transformation”. He believes that most businesses aren’t adequately prepared for the climate-related risks they face.

Extreme weather events, Neves says, “are happening more frequently, but they are unpredictable. We do not know when or where they will happen. Even with one month’s notice, you cannot create the kind of infrastructure necessary to avoid risk.”

In 2014, the GESI and the International Telecommunications Union published a joint assessment of climate risks and suggested several mitigation measures in a research report called Resilient Pathways. They recommended creating redundant backbone networks for service areas that would be resilient to all extreme weather; relocating central offices away from coastal areas and potential future floodplains; developing alternative telecoms technologies that promise to increase reliability; and reassessing standards and industry-wide regulation. Progress since then has been slow, according to Neves. To his knowledge, no one company has ticked all of these boxes.

Yet there is a growing acknowledgment, given the recent run of extreme weather events in Europe, that such matters are overdue for consideration. At the end of July, the European Commission published a “climate-proofing” checklist for new infrastructure pr...