Climate risk is the chance that weather-related events such as storms, floods, heat, or high winds will affect assets, people, or operations. In cyber security, it matters because digital services depend on physical infrastructure: offices, data centers, power, cooling, networks, transport, and staff access. A severe weather event can therefore interrupt authentication systems, backups, communications, or remote work even when no attacker is present.
Defenders use climate risk to guide business continuity and disaster recovery planning. That may include redundant sites, off-site backups, tested failover, emergency access procedures, and dependency mapping for critical services. In practice, climate risk appears when organizations assess which systems are most exposed, how long they can tolerate downtime, and whether they can keep operating if a location loses power or becomes unreachable. It is a resilience issue, but also a security issue because availability is one of the core security goals.