“It is an existential problem which we, in the private sector context, are doing less than 6% about,” a reference to the fact that only 5-6% of climate change finance is going to adaptation. There is a big investment opportunity in the existing technologies and services that can scale and be oriented towards addressing the impacts of climate change, he said. He cited PGE in California, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early this year in the face of ruinous lawsuits over last year’s wildfires. Jay Koh, co-founder and managing director The Lightsmith Group, a New York private equity fund that convenes the Global Adaptation and Resilience Working Group of investors, told the Economist conference on climate risk that climate change is a risk that is affecting corporate valuations today. “We have to find ways to make sure every investment is resilient so we aren’t going to have to rebuild those windmills and bridges in 15-20 years,” he said.īlended finance, with public-sector investment de-risking projects so that they attract larger sums from private investors, was even more suited to adaptation than mitigation projects, he suggested. Although his company’s portfolios are 8-9% invested in green finance, none is in adaptation or resilience. It is an existential problem which we, in the private sector context, are doing less than 6% aboutĪnother member of the commission, Peter Damgaard Jensen, CEO of Dutch pension fund PKA, said it was important to get the private sector involved in financing adaptation. “We hope to see huge energy added to that space,” said Steer. The report will call for a year of action on adaptation, with six or seven action tracks. He added that the Global Commission on Adaptation, which is co-chaired by Bill Gates and World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva, is meeting in Bangladesh this week to prepare a draft report that will be launched at the UN climate meeting in New York in September. Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, opened the half-day conference by saying that the world has “dropped the ball very badly” on raising finance for adaptation, which has been the “poor sister of mitigation for much too long”. Later in the week, Howard Boyd spoke at the Finance for Adaptation Solutions and Technologies Roundtable, hosted by law firm Willis Towers Watson. Welcome as the government’s pledge is, she said, it constitutes a drop in the bucket when considered alongside the $6.3trn needed for global clean infrastructure investment every year. To deal with the climate challenges arising from this growing urbanisation, the UK’s green deal commits the government to spending at least £5.8bn on international climate finance.īetween 20, the UK’s overseas climate finance expenditure came to £3.87bn, much of it directed to urban projects. By the end of the next decade, it is estimated that roughly two thirds of the world’s estimated population of 8.5 billion will be urban dwellers. She predicted that the financial and social cost of climate-linked disasters are likely to continue if collective action is not taken.Ĭiting World Bank estimates, Howard Boyd noted that as many as 100 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 if global temperatures continue to increase, with sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia particularly badly hit.Ĭities are especially vulnerable, she added. The world has 'dropped the ball very badly' on raising finance for adaptation In her speech at the launch event at City Hall, she laid out the scale of the challenge, noting that total global damages from climate-related events have risen by 11% per year over the last two decades, hitting more than $306bn in 2017. Terry Slavin reports on how the Global Commission on Adaptation is seeking to propel finance for resilience up the agenda for policymakers and investorsĬlimate change mitigation was only one strand of London’s Climate Action week. One person who kept popping up at events across the capital was Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the Environment Agency and the UK’s representative on the Global Commission on Adaptation, which was set up by 17 heads of state last October to bring scale and speed to climate adaptation solutions.
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