Cars are parked on the slow lane of a flooded Pingshan Road in Lianyungang city, East China’s Jiangsu Province, Aug. 23, 2021.
Costfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Major regions in the U.S. and China are among the most vulnerable to climate change, according to data published on Monday, with some global industrial and economic centers at risk from rising sea levels, coastal flooding and wildfires.
Climate risk specialists at The Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI), which conducts physical climate risk analyses, found that China is home to 16 of the 20 global regions most at risk of climate change. They analyzed over 2,600 regions across the world to project how much economic damage will occur from climate-related disasters by 2050.
Two of China’s largest sub-national economies, Jiangsu and Shandong, top the global rankings in first and second place, according to XDI data. Over half of the provinces in the global top fifty are in China, which has experienced a rise in manufacturing and infrastructure investment in regions already threatened by climate change.
After China, the U.S. has the most regions at risk of climate change, with Florida ranking tenth on the list, California nineteenth and Texas twentieth. Nearly half of all U.S. states are in the top 5% of those most at risk in the world.
China, India and the U.S. collectively comprise more than half the states and provinces in the top global 100 regions, according to XDI. Other highly-developed and major economic hubs in the top 100 include Buenos Aires, Argentina; São Paulo, Brazil; Beijing, China; and Mumbai, India.
Most of the projected climate-related damage is from flooding or flooding combined with coastal inundation, the report said, but other risks include extreme heat, forest fire, drought-related soil movement, extreme wind and freeze thaw.
“Since extensive built infrastructure generally overlaps with high levels of economic activity and capital value it is imperative that the physical risk of climate change is appropriately understood and priced,” XDI Chief Executive Rohan Hamden said.
“It is crucial for companies, governments and investors to understand the financial and economic implications of physical climate risk and weigh this risk in their decision-making before these costs escalate beyond financial tipping points,” he added.
The XDI analysis is based on a 3 degrees Celsius, or 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, rise in temperatures by 2100, a scenario from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The UN has warned that governments across the world must significantly scale up climate adaptation measures to avoid major economic damage from climate change. The world is on track for temperatures to rise over 3 degrees Celsius this century.
