Company and challenge

DSR & Partners – The Climate Adaptation Advisors is a boutique consultancy helping companies become resilient to a changing climate. Founded in 2024 by Daniel Schmitz-Remberg, the firm brings together a team with more than 20 years of combined experience in sustainability and strategy consulting, and guides clients through a structured path from climate risk to climate resilience. Daniel is also the founder of the Adaptation Exchange, a cross-sector climate adaptation platform.

As physical climate risk shifts from a long-term reporting topic to an immediate operational and financial one, DSR & Partners has partnered with Risk Management Partners to bring Location Risk Intelligence analytics into its advisory work, giving clients a scientifically grounded, decision-ready view of physical climate risk across their assets and value chains.

Idea and approach

The challenge Daniel sees across the market is a familiar one: Many companies are strong on corporate sustainability and on advancing net zero, and they analyse physical risk largely as a box-ticking exercise for standardised reporting such as CSRD. But the frequency and severity of extreme weather events expected over the next five to ten years will disrupt supply chains and value chains.

To give companies a defensible place to begin, Daniel developed the CARMA check, the “Climate Adaptation and Resilience Maturity Assessment”. It distils the question of readiness into 16 of the most relevant questions across four categories:

• Resilience and innovation: how forward-leaning the organisation is on adaptation
• Governance: how responsibility for climate resilience is structured
• Physical risk on site: the actual exposure of locations and assets
• Supply chain: the resilience of the wider value chain

The output is a simple red, amber or green maturity picture. From there, a company can decide what it needs next: to deepen its understanding of physical climate risk, to advance its internal processes, or, if it is already mature, to refine investments and prioritise regionally. As Daniel puts it, the point of CARMA is to find a fixed starting point, whether that means beginning the adaptation journey or advancing it.

This is where Munich Re's Location Risk Intelligence comes in. For clients who need to move from a maturity score to a quantified view of exposure, Location Risk Intelligence acts as a risk atlas: layered data for a company's specific assets worldwide, which teams can explore by hazard, by climate scenario, by region and by area. 

Crucially for an advisory setting, it is intuitive enough to put insight directly into the hands of the people making decisions, rather than locking it behind specialist tooling. Easy to use, insightful, and built on a powerful data backbone: exactly the combination a consultancy needs to make climate risk tangible for a client.

How it worked in practice

In advisory engagements, the CARMA check and Location Risk Intelligence combine into a repeatable method that moves a client from awareness to action. A recent project with an energy company illustrates the approach. The work centred on integrating climate scenarios into the company's decision-making processes, and ran in clear stages:

• Understand the risks first. The starting point was a shared, evidence-based picture of physical climate exposure across the relevant assets.
• Build a methodology with internal stakeholders. DSR & Partners developed a clear method that brought all relevant internal stakeholders together to define what a given exposure actually means.
• Identify the right measures. Using the firm's adaptation solutions navigator, the team analysed relevant measures against the key climate hazards, from flood and storm through to blizzards.

The result was solutions that mitigate risk long before events occur. For one asset category, the analysis identified a pathway to lower risk by up to 75% by 2040. A clear, financially relevant case for acting early rather than absorbing losses later.

Results and impact

By pairing the CARMA maturity assessment with Location Risk Intelligence, DSR & Partners turns climate risk from a periodic reporting task into an input for everyday strategic decisions. Key outcomes include:

1. A defensible starting point for every client. The CARMA check gives companies an objective read of where they stand, so adaptation begins with clarity rather than guesswork.
2. A decision-ready view of physical risk. Location Risk Intelligence's risk atlas translates global, asset-level hazard and scenario data into a view that internal stakeholders can actually use.
3. Earlier, better-prioritised adaptation investment. By analysing measures against specific hazards, teams can act before events occur and focus capital where it lowers risk most.
4. Credibility through trusted methodology. Munich Re's long-standing expertise in natural catastrophes gives clients, boards and investors added confidence in the numbers behind their adaptation decisions.