Contingency planning and risk management are important to any business, but have you thought about including climate change among the risks to consider in those plans? A group including business leaders and former government officials released an analysis of the possible impacts that climate change may have on business in the United States, titled Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States.
The report does not debate evidence about climate change or question causation. Instead, it takes a risk management approach to evaluate the potential economic impacts of a variety of climatic changes predicted from peer-reviewed studies.
Risky Business identifies three primary areas of risk: (1) losses of coastal property and infrastructure; (2) higher temperatures, especially in the South and Midwest, that reduce productivity, threaten human health, and increase demand for energy; and (3) changes in agricultural production that favor northern areas and reduce yields in the South, lower Great Plains, and the Midwest. The report includes specific discussions on six regions of the continental U.S. and separate discussions of Alaska and Hawaii.
Co-Chairs of the Risky Business Project are Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of the City of New York; Henry Paulson, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; and Tom Steyer, former Senior Managing Member of Farallon Capital Management. The group's Risk Committee includes Henry Cisneros, Gregory Page, Robert Rubin, Olympia Snowe, Donna Shalala, George Shultz, and Al Sommer.
The clearly-written discussion is a good place to begin the important dialogue to answer the question "what if?" and to begin to manage the risks presented by the answers to that question.
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