Tag Archives: Climate Change

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Climate Change’s Impact on Cities and Businesses

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Growing populations around the globe have created larger cities, as well as greater concentrations of risk. It is projected that a rise in sea levels and increased intensity of events will amplify the impact of hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, floods and droughts. Because of this, climate change is seen as one of the biggest threats to cities and businesses and could account for an estimated 20% of the global GDP by the end of this century, according to “Business Unusual: Why the climate is changing the rules for our cities and SMEs” by AXA.

While some cities have worked to put resilience plans in place to reduce the impact of flooding and other disasters, there is much to be done and businesses are vulnerable, especially small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Only 26% of SMEs have taken action to protect themselves, yet 54% are worried about the impact climate change could have on their business, and the number rises to 75% in emerging markets, the study found.

AXA-SME impact

“These disasters would be magnified by the fact that populations and assets have never been so concentrated in disaster-prone areas,” Henri de Castries, chairman and CEO of AXA Group said in the report. “Half of the world’s population now resides in cities, often along coastlines, and this proportion is due to rise to nearly two-thirds by the middle of the century, representing some 6.4 billion people. It comes as little surprise, then, that 80% of the climate change adaptation costs for 2010-2050 would be borne by urban areas.”

According to the report, these are common elements of resilience planning:

  • Risk assessments to identify key vulnerabilities.
  • Adaptation of essential infrastructure to withstand changes to the environment.
  • Development of flood defenses to protect inhabited areas from flooding caused by extreme weather events and increased rainfall.
  • Urban planning and relocation of buildings, including adapting to future developments that allow greater resilience to the consequences of climate change.
  • Development of emergency warning and response plans—emergency response planning is a core pillar of resilience strategy.
  • Community engagement and awareness-raising activities.

Additional findings:

Impact IImpactII

 

Risk Managers’ Role in Addressing Climate Change

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QUEBEC CITY, CANADA—Salutations de la ville de Québec! At the first day of this year’s RIMS Canada Conference, climate change quickly emerged as one of the key challenges facing risk managers—and an area with tremendous potential for risk professionals to effect change.

Government clearly has a role to play, but the slower pace and greater number of obstacles they face lessen some of the possible impact. According to Tim East, director of risk management at the Walt Disney Company, that is where businesses come in. Every one of the Dow 30 companies has created environmental and sustainability initiatives, but only 12% of companies have a C-suite or other top-level executive charged with leading action on this front. The clear trend of embracing corporate responsibility stems from a moral obligation businesses all have, and corporations must take initiative in changing how people think, East said.

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Addressing sustainability and other climate change concerns cannot be done in a silo, and efforts must focus on building resilience in all of the assets a business has: facilities, systems and people.

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Risk managers should be taking a leadership role, using their perspective of corporate objectives and performance to help identify and execute the most impactful change.

Risk professionals can particularly help drive this objective to boost awareness within the organization and in the broader community, while also ensuring the business itself is performing in line with sustainability goals. “Risk managers can help become part of the solution by helping to close the gap between the desires and intentions of our organizations and the performance and impact they have,” East said. “This is part of our moral obligation to reduce our impact on the environment.”

Why should companies act? “Not just because it’s good business—although it is, and not just because it’s profitable—although I think it is, but because it’s the right thing to do in the world and for the communities they serve,” East said.

To maximize the impact of these initiatives, East urges risk managers to set and pursue to reduction targets, otherwise they stand little chance of truly achieving change.

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Then, he advises they commit to a process of assessing, identifying opportunities, and measuring impact annually.

On the organizational level, changing mindsets extends beyond having employees recycle or monitoring water use. Business continuity planning is a critical task at Disney, East said, and they were always good at crisis management, addressing urgent problems over the course of a couple of days. Now, however, they are devoting more focus to planning for longer events.

To that end, the company is working to delink events from their consequences—rather than focusing on discrete emergency situations, it is focusing on how the business will be impacted by the conditions that could stem from any of these specific scenarios, he explained.

Getting started and shifting to a long-term focus seem daunting, and the slow rate of observable change often means adaptation and mitigation are not top of mind for businesses, said Lou Gritzo, vice president of research at FM Global. But risk professionals cannot wait for the next disaster or policy change to prompt a more serious evaluation of exposure and strategy.

Getting started on—or further investing in—mitigation efforts may be best focused on one of the main changes we are already seeing: flooding. Existing data shows a clear increase in flooding, and due to sea level risk and increased rainfall and intensity of rainfall, there will only be more, Gritzo said. To manage this growing risk, he recommends risk managers take four key steps:

  1. Know your flood exposure
  2. Be above the water level, and ensure any new construction is as far above it as possible
  3. Have and exercise a plan for flood emergencies
  4. Keep water out – in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a number of physical protection measures have been certified and made commercial available to guard against up to a meter of water

Analyzing the Real Costs of Climate Change

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Are companies prepared for skyrocketing energy costs to combat extreme heat? Can farmers handle average crop losses of up to 73%? Should businesses invest in oceanfront property that is virtually guaranteed to flood? Because of climate change, these are just some of the crucial questions the United States will face before the end of the century, according to “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States,” a report co-chaired by business experts Michael R. Bloomberg, Henry Paulson and Tom Steyer. The report quantifies and publicizes the economic risks posed by a changing climate. While climate change can be a politicized topic, there is little controversy that the phenomenon presents a great deal of risk to everyone, from individuals to institutions.

Decision-makers already use risk analysis to address uncertain situations, routinely evaluating potential threats and challenges such as bad investments or schedule delays. The report adds climate change to the risks that all decision-makers should account for. Robert E. Rubin, co-chair of the Council on Foreign Relations and member of the report’s risk committee, said, “Companies should disclose both their potential exposure to climate risk, and the potential costs they may someday be required to absorb to address carbon emissions.”

The report uses risk analysis, Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) and models to illustrate how different regions are likely to be affected by climate change. The project’s simulation also analyzes efforts to mitigate climate change, showing a changed distribution of probabilities if those efforts are made in the coming years. “As there a very high number of permutations and combinations of weather events, it would be very difficult to analyze these meaningfully using an averaged or deterministic approach,” said Robert Kinghorn, associate director at the consulting firm KPMG Australia. “MCS overcomes this by allowing thousands of possible combinations of extreme weather events to be analyzed.”

MCS can illustrate the potential costs if no adaptation takes place, or if adaptation is employed. The “Risky Business” report demonstrates that ignoring climate change risks will lead to disaster, while taking steps now will have a big impact. Luckily we have tools to face these challenges.

Many forward-thinking business and communities have already applied MCS to climate change risk analysis. For example, AECOM, a professional technical and management support company, used MCS software and optimization techniques to evaluate the risk and costs of climate-change-related flooding of the Narrabeen Lagoon near Sydney, Australia.

AECOM was asked by the Australian Federal Government to conduct an economic analysis of climate change impacts on infrastructure. When the Narrabeen lagoon’s entrance is blocked, it can fill like a bathtub, flooding the surrounding land and houses.

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The community can tackle this problem in various ways—such as a lagoon entrance opening, levee construction, flood awareness and planning controls. Because climate change is expected to increase flooding in the Narrabeen catchment over the coming century, decision-makers needed a clearer understanding of the different possible adaptation measures.

“The objective of the study was to use an economic cost-benefit analysis to identify both what measures government should invest in to prevent the impacts from flood events and when they should invest,” said Kinghorn, who, along with his KPMG colleague Lisa Crowley, developed, designed and ran the project as previous employees of AECOM.

Kinghorn and Crowley estimated the social benefits of adaptation to climate change in terms of willingness to pay, rather than just costs avoided. Using MCS, they generated more realistic probabilities of overall costs and benefits, and modeling the expected future values of variables such as rainfall.

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As the report states, even modest global emission reductions can avoid up to 80% of projected economic costs resulting from increased heat-related mortality and energy demand. While many companies may be resistant to change, the report makes an undeniable case; we cannot afford to ignore the momentous climate risks that threaten our near- and long-term future. “Responding to climate change is no longer a problem without a solution, said Crowley.

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 “It is not a question of do I need to respond, but how do I respond. An effective response to climate change is possible. The complex set of climate change data can be processed through a cost benefit analysis using MCS, producing a set of economic indicators to inform a more meaningful decision-making process on how and when to respond.”

The World’s Most Resilient Cities

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Toronto most resilient city

How do you invest, source and expand responsibly?

Picking the right place to do so may make or break your efforts. At least, that’s the theory of London-based property company Grosvenor. With that in mind, the company analyzed 160 data sets to assess the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of the world’s “50 most important cities” to determine which are the most resilient, with resilience defined as “the ability of cities to continue to function as centers of production, human habitation, and cultural development despite the challenges posed by climate change, population growth, declining resource supply, and other paradigm shifts.”

Grosvenor first measured vulnerability by looking at climate threats, environmental degradation (including pollution and overconsumption due to sprawl), resources, infrastructure and community cohesion. For the next half of the equation, according to the Guardian, “Adaptive capacity, or a city’s ability to prevent and mitigate serious threats, was a combination of governance (high value here on democracy, freedom of speech, community participation, transparency, accountability and long-term leadership vision), strong institutions, learning capacity (including good technical universities), disaster planner and finally funding (from budget to credit and access to global funding).”

Of particular note, eight of the weakest 20 cities are in BRIC countries, and some of the cities where population and industry growth are waiting to boom may pose the greatest risks.