Last updated: March 31, 2026
Adapting to the heat: extreme-ready, business-steady design
“Extreme heat is changing how cities and companies work,” says Lena Fuldauer, Head of Resilience and Business Development at Allianz Risk Consulting. “Nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime peaks, giving buildings and people less chance to cool. High humidity pushes the human body toward dangerous thresholds, raising error rates and shortening safe working hours.”
For businesses, this shows up quickly: heat-sensitive manufacturing and logistics run at reduced line rates; cold chains face higher spoilage; roads and rails buckle, delaying deliveries and commutes.
Digital operations feel the strain too. As cooling loads surge, data centers demand more water and power, increasing the risk of cascading outages. Public services are exposed as well: stressed grids and water systems create systemic impacts on the economy, affecting hospitals, transit networks, and emergency response. Compound events are also more common: heat arrives with drought, wildfire smoke, or grid stress.
For insurers, this breaks many old assumptions: that hazards are stationary, that correlations stay stable, and that loss patterns follow more predictable tails. Losses can now appear in new places and seasons where firms and cities are underprepared.
“Clients often ask, ‘If we don’t know exactly what will happen, how do we plan?’” says Fuldauer. “The answer is robust decision-making: invest in low-regret measures that make sense now and across many futures and deliver co-benefits.”
How Allianz is adapting to the new heat
Insurers are starting to adapt but are still catching up to the full risks of extreme heat. Leading carriers are using updated climate-conditioned catastrophe and heat-stress models to reflect non-stationary hazards, and supervisors are encouraging stress tests that include compound events. At the same time, more insurers are using parametric and continuity-focused covers and pairing them with risk-engineering guidance on cooling, shading and safe work–rest practices — but coverage and maturity still vary widely by market.
The industry is also working to understand how humidity and nighttime heat affect productivity and claims. This includes how to define non-damage business interruption triggers and tracking how risks connect across supply chains and utilities. The overall push is toward prevention, proven adaptation measures and stronger data. However, progress still looks very different from one market and line of business to another.
Fuldauer says that Allianz Commercial is building the capability to help clients identify and manage heat-amplified risks, with a focus on business continuity and practical steps.
Allianz Commercial’s Climate Adaptation and Resilience Services (CAReS) platform enables companies to screen their assets — including owned sites, suppliers, and investments — against multiple climate perils across several time horizons (today, 2030, 2050, 2080). It includes heat metrics such as the number of days above 35°C and 40°C.
They pair this with engineering advice. For heat, recommendations might include shading, building envelopes, ventilation, critical-cooling upkeep, water resilience and safe work–rest protocols. The focus is on continuity: early warnings, clear operational thresholds, and playbooks so teams can shift schedules, pre-cool and pre-position resources.
Allianz Commercial is developing methodologies to translate heat metrics into site-specific operational triggers — for example, converting temperature and humidity thresholds into allowable work time — to help managers justify adaptation investments.
Low-regret measures that pay back
Heat risk will increase in the future. But not every solution needs a 2050 forecast.
“Our focus now is to make the risk visible, support continuity, and help clients prioritize the best no-regret actions, those that make sense now and under different future scenarios,” Fuldauer notes.
On-site, these could include cool roofs and reflective facades, external shading, improved ventilation, night flushing, and insulation around hot basements. They could consist of backing up critical cooling, tightening water systems, adding trees and shade structures, using cooler pavements, and creating covered walkways to keep outdoor workflows moving.
Such steps can help reduce slowdowns, outages, and spoilage now — and deliver comfort, health and energy savings over time.
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About Allianz
The Allianz Group is one of the world’s leading insurers and asset managers, active in almost 70 countries and serving around 97 million private and corporate customers*. Our customers benefit from a broad range of personal and corporate insurance services, including property, life and health insurance, as well as assistance services, credit and global business insurance. Recognized for the seventh consecutive year as the number one global insurance brand in Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2025 ranking, Allianz’s success is built on technology-enabled customer centricity – providing peace of mind, protection, and prevention for our customers and strengthening the resilience of individuals, communities, and societies. We are one of the world’s largest investors, managing around 770 billion euros on behalf of our insurance customers. Furthermore, our asset managers PIMCO and Allianz Global Investors manage about 2.0 trillion euros of third-party assets. Thanks to our systematic integration of environmental and social criteria in our business processes and investment decisions, Allianz received an MSCI ESG Rating of AAA (as of March 2026). In 2025, our 156,000 dedicated employees achieved a total business volume of 186.9 billion euros and an operating profit of 17.4 billion euros for our shareholders.
* As of December 31, 2025. Customer count reflects Allianz customers in consolidated entities that are part of the customer reporting scope only
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