NESTLED IN A forest an hour’s drive from Providence, Rhode Island, sits what some employees call “the world’s biggest facility for property destruction”. Here workers for FM Global, an engineer-cum-insurer, set fire to wall cladding, hurl projectiles at reinforced glass or test roofing designs for the gusts of wind they can take before tearing off. The experiments are designed, monitored and replicated with laboratory precision, beams Louis Gritzo, FM Global’s head of research. All simulate what wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters could do to the structures of its customers, which include such well-known names as Disney, Caterpillar and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
在距离美国罗德岛州普罗维登斯一个小时车程的森林里，座落着一些员工称为“世界上最大的房屋破坏设施”。在这里，工程及保险机构FM Global的工作人员放火焚烧墙面，向固化玻璃投掷弹丸，或者测试设计的屋顶在毁掉前能承受风级的极限。FM Global的研究负责人路易斯·格里佐微笑着表示，这些实验的设计、监测和模拟是达到了实验室级的精准度。所有这些都模拟了野山火、飓风和其它自然灾害对客户的建筑物的影响。它的客户包括迪士尼、卡特彼勒和麻省理工学院等知名企业和机构。
Mr Gritzo’s job is to help future-proof assets—corporate headquarters, factories, theme parks, campuses and the like—worth a total of $10trn globally. When Hurricane Maria swept away most of Puerto Rico’s thriving pharmaceuticals sector in 2017, the building belonging to Mylan, a drugmaker which works with FM Global, was one of the few in its neighbourhood left intact. A strengthened roof had withstood 150mph winds. Mylan kept churning out medicines and FM Global was spared a big payout.
格里佐的工作是帮助保护企业总部大楼、工厂车间、主题公园、校园等资产不受损失——这些资产在全球的总计价值达10万亿美元。当“玛利亚”飓风在2017年席卷波多黎各大部分蓬勃发展的制药业时，与FM Global合作的制药业公司迈兰拥有的这栋建筑是该地区少数几栋完好无损的建筑之一。加固的屋顶经顶住了时速150英里的大风。Mylan一直在生产药品，FM Global也因此省了一大笔钱。
Nature has always disrupted business. But global warming is making the task of dealing with it more urgent. Hastened by feeble progress on curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, businesses face wetter floods, fiercer wildfires and stormier storms than in the past. Hotter, more humid days imperil the productivity both of employees and equipment such as that in data centres.
大自然一直都在捣乱企业。可是，全球变暖使得应对气候变暖的任务更加紧迫。由于在控制温室气体排放方面进展缓慢，企业面临着比过去更大的洪水、更猛的山火和更烈的暴风雨。更为炎热潮湿的天气危及员工以及数据中心等设备的生产效率。
It is not only storms and floods that are a threat. Climate change is also responsible for a lack of water where it is needed. Last summer low levels on the Rhine grounded barges that BASF, a German chemicals giant, uses to ferry its products. Industrial firms fret constantly about water supply. “We are the last in line,” behind residents, farmers, and other businesses, sighs an executive at a big Indian conglomerate. In January PG&E, a utility facing billions of dollars in liabilities over its possible role in sparking wildfires in California, which proliferate as the state grows more parched, filed for bankruptcy protection.
威胁不仅是暴风雨和洪水。气候变化也造成水资源短缺的一个原因。去年夏天，莱茵河水位低，德国化工巨头巴斯夫运输产品的驳船都搁浅了。工业企业经常困扰于供水问题。“我们排在最后”，排在居民、农民和其他企业之后，一位印度大型企业集团的高管如此叹息道。今年1月，美国公用事业企业PG&E申请破产保护，而它因可能此前引发加州森林大火中而面临数十亿美元的债务。
“Business is no longer business as usual,” says R. Mukundan, chief executive of Tata Chemicals, part of another Indian conglomerate based in Mumbai (a city that was the victim of an epic deluge around the time of Maria). Some creditors, investors and insurers murmur similar sentiments. So do senior executives touring Mr Gritzo’s lab. Those worries have grown louder in the past year or two, he reports.
塔塔化工首席执行官•穆昆丹说道：“企业已不再像以往那样。”塔塔化工是位于孟买的另一家印度大综合型企业塔塔集团的下属公司。一些债权人、投资者和保险机构也表达了类似的情绪。参观格里佐的实验室的高管们也是如此。他表示，这些担忧在过去一两年变得更加强烈。
There is reason to be concerned. Last August analysts at Schroders, an asset manager, looked at 11,000 listed global companies and estimated that properly accounting for physical climate risk could on average shave 2-3% off their value. Some sectors would take a bigger hit: utilities and oil and gas stand to lose 4-4.5% (see chart). Some firms face potential losses of up to 20%. Most have no idea of their exposure, suspects Andrew Howard of Schroders.
这些担忧存在合理性。去年8月，资产管理机构施罗德的分析师调查了全球1.1万家上市企业。该机构估计，如果将自然气候风险合理计算在内，这些企业的市值平均会缩水2-3%。一些行业将遭受更大的打击：公用事业和石油天然气行业将损失4-4.5%。一些企业面临的潜在损失高达20%。施罗德的安德鲁•霍华德怀疑，大多数人并不知道自己面临风险损失。
Climate nonchalance pervades many a corner office. One senior European oil executive says that he worries more about snow for his upcoming skiing holiday than he does about his company’s rigs. Bosses have plenty of things on their minds—from trade wars and Chinese hacking to artificial intelligence and the future of work. Those that do profess to think about climate change volunteer stories about their latest solar panels or renewables contracts rather than the physical threat to their infrastructure. But recurrent droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms can all hurt—particularly in a world of complex, just-in-time supply chains readily thrown out of whack. “All reasonable boards should be asking themselves these questions,” declares Bjorn Haugland, vice-president of DNV GL, a Norwegian maritime-services firm. Why aren’t they?
许多办公室里弥漫着对气候漠不关心的气氛。一位欧洲石油企业高管表示，他更担心即将到来的滑雪假期会不会下雪，而不是自家公司的钻井平台。老板们脑子里有很多事情——从贸易战、中国黑客攻击到人工智能和工作的未来。那些确实愿意考虑气候变化的志愿者会讲述他们最新的太阳能电池板或可再生能源合同，而不是基础设施面临的实际威胁。但是，周期性的干旱、洪水、热浪和风暴都可能造成伤害——尤其是在一个复杂的、即时供应链很容易失控的世界里。挪威海事服务公司DNV GL的副总裁Bjorn Haugland宣称：“所有理性的董事会都应该问问自己这些问题。”他们为什么不呢？
Calm before the storm
暴风雨之前的寂静
A dearth of data is one reason. Peter deMenocal at Columbia University has been bringing executives and investors together with academics to discuss climate vulnerabilities since 2015. Scientists feel more comfortable talking in terms of general, long-term trends, he explains. Risk managers want information they can use, about specific threats to specific facilities over a specific (and brief) time period. They tend to fall back on old tools such as flood maps, which presuppose a stable environment. But with the climate changing, “500-year floods” may come far more frequently—just ask Houston’s oilmen, who suffered them in 1979, 2001 and 2017.
缺乏数据是原因之一。自2015年以来，哥伦比亚大学的彼得•德梅尼科一直在将企业高管、投资者和学者共同讨论气候脆弱性问题。他解释道，科学家们更愿意谈论一般性的、长期性的趋势。风险经理需要能用的信息，关于特定(和短暂)时间段内特定设施的特定威胁。他们倾向于使用诸如洪水分布图之类的旧工具，这些工具以稳定的环境为前提。可是，随着气候的变化，“500年一遇的洪水”可能会频繁得多——问问休斯顿的石油工人就知道了，他们分别在1979年、2001年和2017年遭受了洪灾。
A few companies aim to bridge the data gap themselves. Microsoft obsesses over “georedundancy”: where best to locate its cloud servers so that they are close to customers yet unlikely all to be taken out by a single disruption. Like FM Global it relies on climate models, not historical data. Royal DSM, a Dutch chemicals company, employs half a dozen people to unpick climate risks at its 250 locations worldwide, and has produced a detailed threat map.
没几家企业打算自己弥补数据鸿沟。微软痴迷于“地理不确定性”：云服务器的最佳位置是在哪里，这样它们既能接近客户，又不太可能受单一干扰摧毁。与FM Global一样，微软依赖气候模型而不是历史数据。荷兰化工企业皇家帝斯曼在全球250个地点雇佣了6名员工来分析气候风险，并绘制了一份详细的威胁地图。
A cottage industry of climate consultants, often claiming to use cleverer, more granular climate models, has mushroomed to assist companies’ efforts. Acclimatise, a British firm in the business for 14 years, now advises around 40 big corporations (and dozens of public-sector bodies and NGOs). Four Twenty Seven, based in Berkeley, California, screens hundreds of thousands of facilities for exposure and sensitivity to climate risks. In 2017 it ranked the preparedness of France’s 40 biggest firms (LafargeHolcim and Solvay, two materials producers, scored lowest, admen at Publicis and Capgemini’s consultants topped the table, and manufacturers were clustered in the middle). Jupiter, another upstart in the Bay Area, is run by a former research assistant to William Nordhaus, an economist who last year won the Nobel prize for his climate-related work. McKinsey, Oliver Wyman and other big consultancies are getting in on the action, too.
一个由气候顾问组成的家庭手工业经常声称使用更聪明、更细粒度的气候模型，迅速发展起来，以帮助企业应对气候变化。英国一家从事这一行业14年的企业Acclimatise现在为大约40家大公司（以及数十家公共机构和非政府组织）提供咨询服务。美国加州伯克利的机构427对数十万的设施检测气候风险暴露和敏感性。在2017年，它对法国40家最大企业的准备情况进行了排名（两家材料生产商LafargeHolcim和Solvay得分最低，阳狮广告公司和凯捷咨询公司的广告人员位居榜首，制造商则集中在中间）。朱庇特是洛杉矶湾区的另一家新贵，由经济学家威廉•诺德豪斯的前研究助理经营。诺德豪斯去年因其与气候相关的研究获得了诺贝尔奖。麦肯锡、奥美等大型咨询机构也在参与这项活动。
Better data will help. But they do not solve a second problem: first-mover disadvantage. “Unless you’ve faced disruption, building slack into your supply chain is an inefficiency—if others aren’t doing it,” says Mr Howard of Schroders. Four Twenty Seven will not disclose its clients, apologises its founder, Emilie Mazzacurati, because firms do not want to appear vulnerable. “You will be penalised [by the market],” grumbles the sustainability chief of a big European food company. Easier to wait for disaster to strike, then write it off as a non-recurring expenditure, he shrugs.
数据越好，帮助越大。不过，数据不能解决第二个问题:先发劣势。施罗德的霍华德说：“除非你面临重大破坏力，否则在你的供应链中建立富余部分是低效的——如果其他人不这样做的话。”427的创始人艾米丽•马扎库拉蒂道歉道，该公司不会披露客户情况，原因是这些企业不想显得脆弱不堪。欧洲的一家大型食品企业的可持续发展主管抱怨道：“（市场）会惩罚你。”他无所谓地表示，等待灾难降临，然后将其作为一项非经常性支出一笔勾销，这样做更容易。
“Ninety percent of the time risks are being accepted only after they happen,” says Rodney Irwin from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which unites green-minded companies. According to S&P Global, a rating agency, in 2017 just 15% of companies in the S&P 500 index disclosed effects on earnings from weather-related events. Under 5% of firms quantified the damage—an average hit to profits of 6%.
“90%的风险只有在发生之后才会得到接受，”世界可持续发展商业委员会的罗德尼·欧文说道。根据评级机构标准普尔全球的数据，在2017年，标准普尔500指数中只有15%的公司披露了天气相关事件对收益的影响。不到5%的企业量化损失—平均占到利润的6%。
The Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, under the auspices of the Financial Stability Board, a global grouping of regulators, issued reporting guidelines in 2017, including for physical risks, but these remain voluntary. “One way to keep risk undisclosed is not to look at it,” says John Firth, who co-founded Acclimatise. Consider the experience of a multinational carmaker, as revealing as it is commonplace. Its procurement chief relates a hailstorm that struck a factory in the tropics. The response, to erect a roof over the forecourt, was “reactive”, he admits. The incident did not prompt a systemic look at risks elsewhere, let alone investments to pre-empt them.
全球监管机构组成的“金融稳定委员会”主持下的“气候相关金融披露特别工作组”于2017年发布一系列报告准则，其中就包括了实体风险，不过，这些准则仍是自愿实施性质。“不披露风险的一种方法是忽视它，”Acclimatise联合创始人约翰•费斯说。以这家跨国汽车制造厂商的经历为例，尽管这种经历很常见，但也很有启发性。该公司采购主管讲述了一场冰雹袭击了热带地区的一家工厂。他承认，在前院搭建屋顶的反应是“反应性的”。这一事件并未促使人们对其它地方的风险进行系统性审核，更不用说对这些风险加以防范的投入了。
That is because, in the absence of reporting requirements, “cold accounting logic undermines the economic rationale to actively manage climate risks”, explains Rowan Douglas of Willis Towers Watson, an insurance broker. Although climate risks have risen, insurance premiums and borrowing costs—two signals to which the real economy responds—have not grown much costlier. Policies are typically written for one year, so an incremental shift in risk can be hard to discern. Moreover, the price of premiums also depends on other factors, such as availability of capital, with which the industry is awash. It coped with record insured catastrophe losses of $135bn in 2017 without so much as a hiccup. Signals from creditors have been similarly muted.
原因在于，由于没有汇报要求，“冰冷的会计逻辑会破坏积极管控气候风险的经济理性，”保险经纪公司Willis Towers Watson的罗恩•道格拉斯解释道。尽管气候风险上升，保险费用和借贷成本—实体经济应对的两个信号—并没有增加多少。保单通常为一年期，因此很难察觉风险的增量变化。此外，增值的价格还取决于其他因素，如资本的可得性，而这是保险行业资金充裕的原因。该公司在2017年成功应对了创纪录的1350亿美元巨灾损失，连打嗝的机会都没有。债权人发出的信号也同样低调。
Climate of uncertainty
气候的不确定性
Rating agencies are gradually incorporating physical climate risk into their scores. In 2017 environmental and climate considerations led S&P Global to alter 106 corporate ratings, mostly downwards, roughly double the number two years earlier. In 42 cases physical risks were chiefly to blame. In January S&P cut its rating of Edison, an American utility, citing exposure to wildfires. Fitch, another rater, warned that “multi-notch downgrades cannot be ruled out.” A third, Moody’s, last year warned that wildfires threatened PG&E’s solvency.
评级机构正逐渐将实际的气候风险纳入其评分体系之中。在2017年，从环境和气候方面考虑，标准普尔全球指数调整了106家企业的评级，其中多数是下调的，大约是两年前的两倍之多。在42个案例中，实际风险是主要原因。今年1月，标准普尔下调了对美国公用事业公司Edison的评级，理由是该公司受山火影响。另一家评级机构惠誉警告称，“不能排除评级多次下调的可能性。”再就是穆迪公司去年警告说，火灾有可能导致PG&E倒闭清算。
PG&E’s woes stem from legal liabilities, not a direct hit to operations. But its fate should make climate-blind CEOs nervous. On the hook for billions of dollars in damages beyond its policy cover, then downgraded by rating agencies, it found itself locked out of the insurance market. Credit dried up and bankruptcy beckoned. When a big unacknowledged risk comes to light, market signals can become very loud, very quickly, cautions a short-seller eyeing climate-vulnerable firms.
PG&E的困境源于法律责任，而不是运营受到直接打击。不过，它的命运应该让无视气候的首席执行官们感到不安。除了保险覆盖范围之外，它还遭受了数十亿美元的损失，随后遭评级机构降级，结果发现自己排斥在了保险市场之外。信贷枯竭，破产迫在眉睫。一位关注受气候影响企业的卖空者警告，当一个未被承认的巨大风险暴露出来时，市场信号可能会变得非常响亮、非常迅速。
Compare that with DSM’s approach. In drought-prone places identified by its survey the company is helping nearby towns harvest water, not least to keep local employees healthy and productive. It badgers the authorities to bring in pre-emptive measures, such as more resilient infrastructure. “We provide jobs, you provide protection,” Feike Sijbesma, DSM’s chief executive, told politicians. Tata and other firms in climate-stressed India have long taken similar steps, for similarly hard-nosed reasons. As the future unfolds, this strategy should bring bigger rewards than hiding your head in the sand.
以DSM公司的方法相比，在调查确定的易受干旱影响的地区，该公司正在帮助附近城镇收集水源，尤其是让当地员工保持健康和高效。它迫使当局采取先发制人的措施，比如更具弹性的基础设施。DSM首席执行官Feike Sijbesma告诉政治人物：“我们提供工作，你们提供保护。”长期以来，塔塔集团等受到气候压力下的印度企业都采取了类似的措施，理由也很类似。随着未来的发展，这种策略应该会带来比逃避更大的回报。
编译：王敏
编辑：翻吧君
来源：经济学人（2019. 02.21 ）
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