What Infrastructure Investors Need To Know About The Latest Climate Change Report

What Infrastructure Investors Need To Know About The Latest Climate Change Report

An iceberg floats in a glacial lagoon in Iceland, July 2021 The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is out, and it's not pretty: "Climate change [impacts are] widespread, rapid, and intensifying." Climate scientist Michael Mann summarizes the latest findings in three basic points: 1. The "hockey stick" of rising global temperatures is continuing at unprecedented rates; 2. The impacts are now widespread, with more extreme weather events; and 3. It's still not too late to do something to blunt the worst of the potential impacts. None of this will come as a significant surprise to most professional infrastructure investors at this point. Many institutional investors I speak with are already keenly aware of the climate change megatrend affecting their markets, and it's one reason so many institutions are shifting their investments from fossil fuel projects into renewables. However, while that shift is highly visible in power generation project finance, investors need to also heed the warning from the IPCC on all their other categories of infrastructure as well. Because the rapidly-growing effects of climate change no longer allow investors to think about their long-term infrastructure assets in the same way. One useful case study may