Whether people believe in it or not, climate change is here—and it’s going to change not just temperatures and sea levels but also business—and jobs.

The BBC reports that weather effects are just one facet of the changes being wrought by a warming climate; everyone who works, no matter what their field, will be affected too.

The report says, “Climate change is shaking up everything from finance to health. As a result, it isn’t only urban planners in at-risk areas who will have to shift their framework for planning for the future. From financial planners to farmers, civil engineers to doctors, an increasingly wide range of other professionals are likely to find their industries affected.”

And that will affect everyone from young to old—millennials trying to build careers and save for the future may have to rethink their plans and strategies, while older workers who might already be struggling to remain in the workforce to supplement (or even begin) retirement savings might find it even harder to keep working, or else change professions altogether—or relocate to where new jobs are growing.

The report quotes Andrew Winston, author of the book The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World, saying, “Everyone is going to need to understand [climate change] the same way you’d assume everyone in business needs to have some fluency in social media today, or that everyone would able to use a computer 20 years ago.”

People are already struggling to stay nimble in moving from job to job, or even adding gig economy jobs into an already crowded schedule. But the promise (or threat) of having to make even more drastic adjustments is something we’ll have to consider in the days and years to come.

Not only will many have to consider transitioning to employment in a green economy, including sustainability initiatives, others will have to adapt to job requirements for advanced degrees and skills in meeting the challenges of a changing climate.

A Financial Times report by Mark Fawcett, chief investment officer of NEST, the U.K. pension provider, highlights just one of the many ways people will be affected: millennials’ pensions. Fawcett points to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord as an action not typical of where the future’s economy is heading: to greener pastures.

While Fawcett points out that it’s not clear what impact Trump’s rejection of the accord and of former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan—“what one commentator called ‘the most important thing any nation had ever done to reduce carbon emissions’”—the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction.

While U.S. workers may have to relocate to work for some of the largest markets in a future economy—think China and India, among others, both spending freely to build a green energy economy, and utility companies in EU countries as they seek to meet Paris commitments—investors, including institutional investors, are moving money into areas that will “prepare their portfolios for the evident risks and opportunities that climate change and the transition to low carbon represent.”

Millennials would be well advised to pay heed, since, Fawcett says, “Over the next 15 years or so, £1.7 trillion [$2.191 trillion] is due to flow into defined contribution pensions in the U.K. We believe a significant proportion of those assets will be channeled towards a greener global economy.” And you can bet U.S. institutional investors, regardless of the current administration’s retreat, will be following along.

Then there’s the issue of income inequality—because climate change is going to come down a lot harder on the poor than on the rich in the U.S. In fact, it could actually help the latter.

A report in the Santa Fe New Mexican points out a new study published in the journal Science that “details how global warming could disproportionately affect poor areas of the country, contributing to widening economic inequality among Americans.”

“The poor regions will get poorer and the richer regions will benefit,” study coauthor Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is quoted saying, adding, “What we’re seeing here is that climate change will have a very large impact on the quality of life and economic opportunity in the coming decades for ourselves and our children.”

Just how bad will it be? Overall, the study finds, the U.S. economy would likely lose about 0.7 percent of its gross domestic product for each 1 degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperatures, although each degree of warming will bring more costs than the last. But that’s not going to hit Americans uniformly.

Instead, the poorest third of U.S. counties, many in the South and lower Midwest, could, toward the end of this century, suffer economic losses comparable to those during the Great Recession. The study finds that the Gulf Coast would be threatened by hurricanes and encroaching seas, while hotter temperatures in the South would see air conditioning costs soar while driving down productivity. And Midwestern agriculture could see losses on par with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, only “these long-term changes are here to stay,” Hsiang said.

According to the report, Northern and Western areas of the country are likely to be in for less substantial damages, with researchers saying they might even benefit from warming temperatures that could bring longer growing seasons and lower energy costs.

In the end, the authors concluded, “combining impacts across sectors reveals that warming causes a net transfer of value from Southern, Central and Mid-Atlantic regions toward the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes region, and New England. … [B]ecause losses are largest in regions that are already poorer on average, climate change tends to increase preexisting inequality in the United States.”

Another study published in late 2015 in Nature, says the report, “found a strong relationship between a region’s average temperature and its economic productivity,” with researchers comparing economic and temperature data for more than 100 wealthy and poorer countries over half a century. The findings? The optimum temperature for human productivity appears to be about 55 degrees Fahrenheit on average. Beyond that, economic productivity “strongly” began to decline.

The numbers from these studies point to the potential for growing inequality not just in the U.S., but globally—since “already hot, poor countries are likely to experience the most severe temperature increases.”

And it won’t be going away any time soon, like the problems that accompany economic downturns are sometimes wont to do. Instead it will necessitate a complete attitude adjustment on jobs, standards of living, and what retirement may look like in future decades.

Hsiang said in the report, “When you impose these costs on the economy, they just don’t go away,” he said. “It’s like an ongoing recession we just never climb out of.”

Instant Insights /

Business, workforce will be transformed by climate change

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