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Climate change: global assets worth up to US$12.7 trillion to be exposed to climate risks by 2100, report by UN-backed panel says

  • The world faces unavoidable climate hazards as global warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius within two decades from pre-industrial levels, IPCC report says
  • Asia ‘potentially more vulnerable to climate change’, AECOM executive says

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Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour during Typhoon Kompasu, which hit the city in October 2021. Asia’s long coastlines make it potentially more vulnerable to climate change. Photo: Nora Tam
While billions of people and ecosystems least able to cope are being hit hardest by climate change, trillions of dollars worth of assets will be exposed to risks from storms and rising sea levels in the future, scientists said.
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The world faces unavoidable climate hazards as global warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius within two decades from pre-industrial levels, they said in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on Monday. Human activities have already caused an average temperature rise of 1.1 degrees since 1850.

“Many of the changes are at risk of becoming irreversible,” Mami Mizutori, special representative of the UN secretary-general for disaster risk reduction, said in a statement. “On our current trajectory, the world is set to breach the 1.5 degrees safe global temperature limit by the early 2030s, spiralling to dangerous levels of disaster risk.”

The report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, was approved on Sunday by 195 member governments of the IPCC, which was created by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988.

By 2100, global assets exposed to once-in-100 year coastal flood risk are projected at between US$7.9 trillion and US$12.7 trillion, even if carbon dioxide emissions start declining by around 2045 to reach roughly half of the levels of 2050 by 2100.

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