Asset-level assessment of climate physical risk matters for adaptation finance
The authors provide a methodology that quantifies physical risks on geolocalized productive assets, considering their exposure to chronic and acute impacts (hurricanes) across the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate physical risk assessment is crucial to inform adaptation policies and finance. However, science-based and transparent solutions to assess climate physical risks are limited, compounding the adaptation gap. This is the main limitation to fill the adaptation gap.
This paper also provides a translated asset-level shocks into economic and financial losses, applying the methodology to Mexico, a country highly exposed to physical risks, recipient of adaptation finance and foreign investments. It is shown that investor losses are underestimated by up to 70% when neglecting asset-level information, and up to 82% when neglecting tail acute risks. Therefore, neglecting the asset-level and acute dimensions of physical risks leads to large errors in the identification of adaptation policy responses, investments and finance tools aimed to build resilience to climate change.