The Sustainabilist | SMART CITIES
I FEATURE
Investing during Climate Volatility Asia is sinking, flooding, burning, and freezing – all at the same time By Kay Van Petersen Global Macro Strategist at Saxo Bank
t seems like each year volatility in temperatures, seasons and weather — as well as natural disasters —become more extreme.
Climate disasters tend to act like volatility in the markets, whereby volatility begets more volatility. One disaster raises the probability and potential magnitude of another type of disaster, because nature is interlinked. For instance, fires lead to flooding due to destroyed vegetation. Meanwhile, the mega-cities of major countries are now at risk of sinking & flooding. As a case in point, the capital of Indonesia is Jakarta, whose greater metropolitan area has a population of 30 million. Jakarta is one of the world’s fastest sinking cities, dropping over 10cm a year. That is about the width of an adult male’s palm. The irony that faces the sinking city, that is regularly hit by tropical cyclones as well as sea storms, is that it has a lack of clean drinking water. Given its thirteen polluted rivers, for decades the city has been pumping ground water with virtually no meaningful replenishment of the natural underground basins. This is all due to a population explosion, lack of green space
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