Most, 84 per cent of the world’s fastest growing cities have in common? Rapid growth, rising temperatures and increasingly severe weather events brought on by climate change are putting companies and investments at risk.
Combining new UN projections on rates of annual population growth in over 1800 cities with subnational data from our Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), we assess the threat from climate change over the next 30 years. We found that of the 100 fastest growing cities by population, 84 are rated ‘extreme risk’, with a further 14 in the ‘high risk’ category.
Over 95pc of the 234 cities considered ‘extreme risk’ in the CCVI are in Africa and Asia, compounding fears that the world’s poorest countries are set to pay the highest price of climate change. The scale of the risk could threaten the capital flows that have streamed into these markets to take advantage of burgeoning economies, emerging consumers and cheap labour.
At the other end of the spectrum, 86pc of the 292 ‘low risk’ cities are in Europe and the Americas. The five cities considered most insulated from the impacts of climate change in the CCVI, Glasgow (pictured), Belfast, Edinburgh, Preston and Middlesbrough, are all in the UK.
The stats come from risk analysis firm Verisk Maplecroft. Richard Hewston, Principal Climate Change and Environment Analyst at the firm, said: “Businesses operating in megacities have to understand the physical risks in the short, medium and long- term. They must work to build their resilience to climate shocks, not only to protect their assets and people, but also to satisfy investors that are increasingly factoring climate risk into their investment process.”
The analysts’ city risk profiles include risk scores covering threats, potential physical risks, and a range of issues affecting the operating environment. Issues with the highest risk scores include concise analysis of the severity of the risk and its likely impact on an organisation based in the city. Damage to infrastructure, property and assets caused by tropical cyclones or flooding are among the more obvious impacts, but the potential disruption caused by the secondary threats of disease and increases in crime and civil unrest are not to be ignored, the firm says. For a full report visit the Verisk Maplecroft website.
