post-tropical storm Sandy devastated New York, the city was left in darkness. Among the few buildings still lit up was the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, which had a 25,000-sandbag wall and a backup generator. Gary Cohn, then the bank’s president, said one problem was how to get staff into the office in a shut-down city. In 2018, after a storm battered Vancouver Island, falling trees toppled electricity poles. The resulting power cut led to the closure of a water-treatment plant.
Even if the goals of the Paris agreement were met and warming limited to below 2°C, the weather would keep getting worse. This may mean, among other things, a 40-80cm rise in sea levels, a 25% increase in dangerously hot days and a 36% jump in the quantity of rainfall over land. And each additional degree of warming increases the impact. Between 1981 and 2010, the average likelihood of a big heatwave was 5%. With global temperatures up by 1.
As its impact becomes clearer, companies have to take climate change more seriously. Partly that reflects growing pressure from regulators, who want them to disclose their climate risks. Doing this is already mandatory for some firms in France. The European Union, Britain and Canada will follow suit.
Defending an office or factory is reasonably straightforward. A thornier problem is supply chains. The world economy promotes efficiency in suppliers and transporters, not resilience. The risk to trading networks from climate change is often overlooked. Transport hubs are key. Airports and seaports process huge quantities of goods. A disaster that downs one can have an outsized impact, says Andrew Coburn of Cambridge University’s Centre for Risk Studies, an academic group.
The risks are amplified when suppliers cluster in specialised regions. About 70% of the world’s smartphones are assembled in one region of China. Another sub-region accounts for half of global laptop production. That was a problem when covid-19 struck, because many laptop vendors hold just two weeks’ supply, says Razat Gaurav, the boss of Llamasoft, a supply-chain analytics firm. The risk of these regions being disrupted is rising.
Make a run on the toilet paper!!!
Climate change?
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