[MCN] Stock market is exposed to climate risk: "serious complacency persists"

[Lance Olsen]

Insurance Journal Dec 27 2018
Underestimating Climate Change Risks Could Hit Investors: Opinion
By Mark Buchanan
1st 4 paragraphs

As the effects of climate change unfold, its impact on business will grow more severe: altered rain patterns will affect agriculture, floods will disrupt supply lines, heat waves will prevent employees from working. If markets are to work well, investors need to know about these consequences, and the number of companies that voluntarily disclose their estimates of climate-linked risks has risen markedly over the past 15 years. They now account for around 69 percent of market capitalization, and such disclosure could soon be mandatory in many nations.

Of course, information only helps if it’s accurate. A comprehensive new study has assessed the plausibility of these corporate disclosures, comparing them to the best scientific and economic estimates of the likely costs of adjusting to climate change. The good news: Every year, more businesses start taking climate risks more seriously. However, current reporting also has serious blind spots that could leave investors uninformed and exposed.

In 2015, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warned in a speech <https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2015/09/30/383117.htm> to Lloyd’s of London about the “Tragedy of the Horizon,” his term for global risk arising from the inherent disparity between the short-term thinking of financial markets and the long-term nature of climate. Companies concerned with pressing challenges, he suggested, may not be accurately disclosing to investors the risks they face due to climate change. To test Carney’s hunch, Allie Goldstein of the environmental organization Conservation International and colleagues took the voluntary disclosures made in 2016 by more than 1,600 large companies worldwide and compared the risk estimates within to estimates from scientists and economists.

According to their findings, most companies expect climate change will increase their operational costs and reduce or disrupt production capacity due to events such as floods, drought or hurricane damage. And awareness is growing rapidly: The number of companies seeing such risks as either “virtually certain” or “more likely than not” to occur surged from 34 percent in 2011 to 67 percent in 2016. Yet serious complacency persists.

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2018/12/27/512883.htm <https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2018/12/27/512883.htm>

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"Ongoing reductions to groundwater storage are drying groundwater wells in the western US, and this manifestation of water scarcity warrants innovative groundwater management transcending status quos."
 
D. Perrone and S. Jasechko. 
Dry groundwater wells in the western United States. 
Environmental Research Letters  12 (2017) 104002
 
OPEN ACCESS
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa8ac0

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