Climate Risk

By Alan Miller & Stacy Swann Odds are, wherever you live, your climate is changing.  It may be hotter and drier, with more drought and wildfires, or you may be experiencing more severe storms and extreme rainfall.  You may notice it, or you may not, but the folks at NASA are keeping track, and August was another record breaker. Our ability to create a sustainable, poverty-free future – as envisioned by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – depends on understanding how these changes will affect the essentials that we all rely on: water, food, energy, and infrastructure. It depends on [...]

Let’s review a few of the more striking facts about our climate to emerge in the last week: In 2015, the planet was the warmest ever recorded. By a long shot. Global sea levels are at their highest since satellites began recording those levels in 1993, up an alarming 2.75 inches. While many parts of the world saw above-normal rainy seasons, which led to major floods, the amount of land surface globally experiencing severe drought increased from 8% in 2014 to 14% in 2015, indicating extremes in the Earth’s water and precipitation cycles. In the first six months of 2016, [...]

While the East Coast of the US avoided a direct hit this weekend by Hurricane Joachim, it was still a not-so-welcome reminder that we may not be as ready as we should be for as severe weather events that will likely become the norm (and not the exception) thanks to a changing climate. My work is not weather forecasting but finance and specifically the nexus of climate change and finance. Given the attention climate change is now getting with these more frequent weather extremes many people ask why is it that so little finance flows towards “climate smart” investment. The [...]