According to the report as much as $106 billion worth of existing coastal property in the US will fall below sea level by 2050. This oceans could engulf as much as $507 billion worth of property by 2100.
While areas inland will not succumb to flooding, they will not be immune from the impacts of a warmer world. In the Midwest extreme heat will result in reduced crop yields and in the Southeast, extreme heat will have serious impacts on labor productivity. Both reduced crop yields and decreased productivity will have far reaching economic consequences.
As Bloomberg, co-chair of the Risky Business Project, says: "Damages from storms, flooding, and heat waves are already costing local economies billions of dollars—we saw that first hand in New York City with Hurricane Sandy. With the oceans rising and the climate changing, the Risky Business report details the costs of inaction in ways that are easy to understand in dollars and cents—and impossible to ignore."
To put this is terms an investor can understand, "Climate change is nature’s way of charging us compound interest for doing the wrong thing," explained Tom Steyer, an investor, philanthropist and president of NextGen Climate. "The longer we wait to address the growing risks of climate change, the more it will cost us all."
As explained by Dr. Al Sommer, dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, "if we stay on the ‘business as usual’ path, things only get worse from there—we shouldn’t take that risk."
Anything short of immediate action on climate change presents "risky business."
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