Displaying items by tag: climate change

(New York)

Climate change risk has slowly but surely crept into the consciousness of even the most mainstream investors. As its prominence has risen, so too has its ability to impact share prices. With that in mind, here are some of the individual shares most vulnerable to such risk. The names are not what you would expect. For instance, Norwegian Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean Cruises, along with pharma companies Merck and Bristol-Myers-Squibb were identified as the most at risk. “There are many ways to measure how climate change affects your portfolio. One is to see how the physical facilities of the S&P 500’s constituent companies are affected by hurricanes, sea-level rise, and heat stress”, says Barron’s. One head of ESG commented on the list that “you’re exposed” no matter where a company has its headquarters”.

FINSUM: Norwegian is most exposed because it has so many facilities in Miami, where the risk of rising sea levels is very high. Sorting out these risks is a major challenge and it would behoove advisors to seek out the main data providers for such risk, like Four Twenty Seven.

(New York)

Bloomberg has come out with a very interesting piece about how climate change has been affecting the US real estate market. A new study looked at over 3,000 US cities and mapped them by risk to different types of climate change-drive natural disasters, like hurricanes, floods, and wild fires. What the study concluded was quite striking—in all of those categories, the riskiest locations had seen values drop considerably, while the safest locations had seen major gains. For hurricane surge risk, for instance, the “very low risk” locations had seen annual gains of 8.1% between 2007 and 2017, while the “very high risk” locations saw annual losses of 9.1%.

FINSUM: It is interesting to see that Americans have been taking account of these risks for some time even as the national debate over climate change rages on. This could be a major new differentiating factor in real estate.