Raise your hand if you’ve been personally victimised by bad weather in the last year or so. Was your travel disrupted? Did your home get unbearably hot? Have you been impacted by flooding? When I asked these questions at a panel event recently, only a lucky few in the audience kept their hands down.
Even if we were not individually experiencing climate change, we would want our communities to avoid these inconveniences and tragedies. After all, human societies cannot thrive underwater, which is why the Netherlands has some of the best flood management systems in the world.
Yet emissions from burning fossil fuels are baking the planet and, therefore, the effects of extreme weather and sea-level rise are coming at us thick and fast. In many cases, we need to prepare and adapt with more urgency than we had planned to.
Take the example of the UK, where I live. In April 2023, the government brought forward the deadlines for raising tidal flood defences upstream of the Thames Barrier by 15 years to 2050 because sea levels are rising at an accelerated rate. In 2021, the Climate Change Risk Assessment said “there is a very small chance” of the UK exceeding 40°C (104°F) by 2040. A year later, temperatures rose above that to a record 40.3°C.
The London Climate Resilience Review, commissioned by the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, and chaired by Emma Howard Boyd, former head of the Environment Agency, pulled no punches when it laid out the multiple “lethal” risks for Londoners. It concluded that the UK’s capital is underprepared for more frequent, overlapping, and severe climate impacts.
Adaptation — the process of adjusting our lives and infrastructure to the effects of climate change — was once mitigation’s controversial cousin. Now, it is seen as a necessary evil. Some considered it a taboo topic out of fear that it accepted the damage done to our planet and minimised the critical need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
See also: Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero making changes after opt-outs
The money spent on adaptation lags way behind allocations for mitigation. A 2024 climate finance report from the Climate Policy Initiative, an independent nonprofit, found that while mitigation finance totalled US$1.3 trillion globally in 2022, adaptation finance reached just US$76 billion. The vast majority comes from public funds. Yet, given the scale of the issue, it is clear that there’s a need for private sector involvement.
Even though adaptation is now taken much more seriously and considered essential by experts, it is seen as less investable than mitigation — particularly when the focus of private finance is revenue generation. But as three reports on adaptation financing found, there are a couple of urban centres that London and other UK cities could learn from: Singapore and Copenhagen.
London’s approach to adaptation relies heavily on public funding with limited private financing involvement, while climate policy itself is considered fragmented and unstable, according to a co-author of the reports, Raffaele Della Croce, co-director of the Singapore Green Finance Centre and an advanced research fellow at the Centre for Climate Finance and Investment, Imperial College Business School.
See also: Citigroup, Bank of America leaving global climate banking alliance
Singapore, however, has an ambitious whole-government approach to climate adaptation, committing US$100 billion ($134 billion) to the task by the end of the century. This, alongside sustainable planning frameworks and the involvement of its central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), creates a sense of urgency and regulatory certainty. With a clear signposted route to adaptation, the city-state has been successful in building protective infrastructure, such as the impressive Marina Barrage, and integrating nature into the urban environment to protect against storm surges and heatwaves.
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, the Cloudburst Management Plan — designed after a devastating once-in-1,000-year rainfall event to help the city better cope with excess water — has led to effective transformation across the city. The use of natural solutions — trees, ponds and soil — also helps address other climate hazards, such as extreme heat. To pay for it, the Danish city adopted an innovative finance programme, utilising a water tariff and municipal pooled-credit facility called KommuneKredit.
Failing to embed adaptation considerations into planning decisions will cause problems. Many have blamed the removal of dams for the tragic flooding in Valencia and other parts of Spain. The stonking deluge of rain, likely intensified by climate change, was ultimately the real hazard — but had dams remained in place, it may not have had such devastating consequences.
The final report is full of detailed recommendations for government, financial institutions and investors alike, including ways to mobilise more private capital with innovative financial instruments and improved climate risk assessments.
But there’s a simple lesson to be learned from places successfully adjusting to the climate crisis, too: When the government takes an active role in promoting adaptation and incorporating resilience needs into standards and regulations, enthusiasm and money will often follow. — Bloomberg Opinion
