Man Group’s Co-Head of Responsible Investment Jason Mitchell speaks with Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the Environment Agency.
Man Group’s Co-Head of Responsible Investment Jason Mitchell speaks with Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the Environment Agency.
May 2019
Hotter summers, colder winters, more floods, even more droughts: as the world experiences more extreme weather conditions, building resilience into infrastructure is vital to addressing the challenges of climate change in the future, according to Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the UK Environment Agency.
Already, in 2019, Australia has sweltered in record-breaking heat, while the US Midwest was hit by freezing conditions colder than Antarctica.1 In the UK, winter temperatures soared past 20 degrees centigrade for the first time ever.
“Wherever you are in the world now, you’re experiencing climate change,” Howard Boyd said in a podcast hosted by Jason Mitchell, co-head of responsible investment at Man Group. “I think it’s really essential for us to start thinking about infrastructure spend: are we future-proofing it? Are we making sure that it is low-carbon and energy-efficient? But also, are we making sure that it is resilient for the climate change that we are going to see and that it won’t become stranded in the future because it either floods or melts or washes away or falls into the sea as a result of weather events?”
Figure 1. Number of Deaths per Disaster Type, 2018
Source: CRED.
Indeed, parts of the world that have experienced hurricanes recently are now insisting that when those communities are built back, they are built back better, Howard Boyd said in the podcast. “The insurance industry – working with local governments, working with the building regulations – are insisting that new housing, new businesses, new infrastructure is built for the next hurricane rather than the last one.”
“These are the sorts of things we need to understand better; learn from each other; and through partnership, make sure that we are evolving or thinking about adaptation resilience – quickly, because it’s getting ever more urgent,” she said.
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