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Macroscope | Climate change must be a wake-up call for investing in our survival
- With extreme weather events linked to global warming set to increase in frequency and scale, sustainable infrastructure funding remains critically low
- To provide real solutions, financial markets need to get more involved in directing savings towards climate investment
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The hurricane season is due to begin around now in the Atlantic Ocean, along with the typhoon season in the northwest Pacific. So, if climate change stays on course, we can expect some major and costly – if not to say terrifying – disasters.
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The turbulence of the kind that badly damaged Singapore Airlines Flight 321 – and led to the death of one passenger with over 100 injured – over Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Basin could become a much more regular occurrence it seems, thanks also to climate change.
Such events will no doubt grab headlines when they occur, especially if they involve the loss of human life, but the battering of ports, highways, railways and other infrastructure, not to mention planes and ships, might attract far less attention.
There’s no doubt many will shrug and say, “Let insurers take care of it; that’s what we pay premiums for.” But the problem is much bigger than that, and not only because premiums will rocket and some risks will become uninsurable.
It’s no longer a matter of insuring against risks such as fires, floods, hurricanes and typhoons which are labelled “acts of God”. It’s about coping with man-made disasters where the costs will be infinitely greater.
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It’s a matter now of forking out literally trillions of dollars to reinforce essential infrastructure – existing and planned – so that it stands a chance of withstanding the savage onslaught of climate-change-induced calamities.
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