Mercer said its model suggests climate change would depress the economy and weigh on interest rates. While most first-world government bonds could benefit from investors seeking safe havens against climate risks, Australia and New Zealand government bonds could be sensitive to physical damage caused by extreme weather events and resource scarcity.
Worldwide real estate would also suffer a net loss, Sowden said. While rising seas and more intense hurricanes would likely push people inland, increasing the value of land that is now sparsely inhabited, those gains would be swamped by the loss in value -- or simply the outright loss -- of wide swaths of coastal property. The land that remains inhabitable would become increasingly expensive to insure.
“These scenarios are negative for global growth, and they’re not really great for anyone,” Sowden said. Among the few areas of the economy he said were likely to have positive returns in a beyond-two-degrees scenario: Disaster-mitigation infrastructure, such as flood-wall defenses.
Mercer recommends governments take action to stick to their Paris 2015 climate goal commitments, and that investors increase their holdings of sustainable infrastructure and renewable energy assets to take advantage of the shift.
While scientists are cautious to link any single weather event to global warming, they’ve built consensus around the probability that more powerful floods, fires, droughts and storms will occur with greater frequency as the Earth gets hotter.
The United Nations wants to hold average temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius, which would still represent the quickest shift in the climate since the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago.
Extreme weather events are the most threatening global risks this year, the World Economic Forum said in a report published January. That same month, the U.S. Defense Department warned climate change could compromise U.S. security, with rising seas increasing flood risk to military bases and drought-fueled wildfires endangering those inland.
As those warnings multiply, some fund managers have been slow to incorporate the dangers of global warming into their investment decisions, Sowden said. But as climate change advances, asset prices could quickly shift to reflect the risk -- something he said is likely to happen within the next five years.
“If the market starts to price in these impacts, it could start to have material impacts, especially at the sector level, in a relatively short period of time,” Sowden said.
This article provided by Bloomberg News.