how do I answer the question what climate risks my company faces

Physical and transition risks, not just scope 1-2-3

Climate risks are different from emissions: the question is about what climate does to your business, not what your business does to climate. VSME makes a distinction between physical risks — flooding, drought, heat, storm damage to a facility or a supplier — and transition risks: costs from new regulation, a carbon price, or customers switching to a provider with lower emissions. A questionnaire asking about this usually wants to know whether you have identified those two categories for your own locations and for your main suppliers, not whether you have already solved them.

Where you often get stuck: the questionnaire asks about risks, but expects an emissions figure or a reduction target as proof. Those are different answers. A customer asking whether you have set a target to reduce emissionsis testing something different than a customer asking whether you know which facility is at risk during extreme rainfall. If you do not have a formal risk inventory, then "no, not yet mapped" is a more honest answer than entering a figure you do not have. The same principle applies to the scope classification that often appears in the same questionnaire: correctly fill in scope 1, 2 and 3 is about the source of emissions, not about exposure to climate damage.

Basis for this classification: VSME and the GHG Protocol

The distinction between physical and transition risks comes from the basic module of EFRAG VSME, the voluntary reporting standard for non-listed SMEs. The GHG Protocol provides the scope 1-2-3 classification for emissions, which sometimes appears as a supplementary question in climate risk questions but is legally a different subject from risk exposure.