The Mercer Research report, Investing in a Time of Climate Change, details the prospects — and the pitfalls — of various climate scenarios. For the report, “Mercer collaborated with 16 investment partners, collectively responsible for more than US$1.5 trillion, to produce the report,” including Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and “the private sector arm of the World Bank Group.”
A Bloomberg column by investment guru Barry Ritholtz summed up the report: “In the real world, climate-change deniers are and will be giant money losers.”
The report has several key findings. Clearly, “climate change will give rise to investment winners and losers.” Some industries, like coal, will likely see average annual returns over the next decade “eroding between 26% and 138%,” depending on how aggressively the world attempts to fight climate change. Other industries, like renewables, could see average annual returns increase by up to 97 percent over the 10-year period — if the world does seriously move toward a 2°C pathway coming out of the Paris climate talks this December.
The report identifies three phases investors may go through — “Climate-Unaware Future Takers,” “Climate-Aware Future Takers,” and finally “Climate-Aware Future Makers”:
A key goal of the report is to get investors to “progress along these phases to the extent they can.” Significantly, if investors make it to the final phase — the “future makers” — they “feel compelled by the magnitude of the longer-term risk of climate change to seek to influence which scenario comes to pass.”
Some investors might become “future makers” because they feel compelled as human beings to try to minimize the potential harm to billions of other people. But the study makes clear you don’t have to be altruistic to desire a 2°C future. Strictly from an investment perspective, the sustainable path is much better than the catastrophic one.
Read more at Bloomberg: ‘Climate Change Deniers Will Be Giant Money Losers’
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