23rd November, 2020 – CWR releases new report, “Avoiding Atlantis: CWR APACCT 20 Index – Benchmarking coastal threats for 20 APAC cities with finance sector input”, an index that benchmarks 20 APAC capitals and key cities for chronic risks from coastal threats. The CWR APACCT 20 Index reflects impacts on land area, population, key infrastructure – stacked locked-in sea level rise (SLR) risks for 1.5˚C, 2˚C, 3˚C & 4˚C are assessed for each indicator; subsidence, storm surge plus government action are also included.

Over 100 finance professionals from chairs/directors of bank boards to research analysts as well as financial industry associations, asset owners and financial regulators have provided feedback on the development of this index. Their wants, thoughts and feedback on the design, development, indicators and weightings in creating an index are detailed in this report.

The finance sector wanted a real snapshot of risk across APAC that helped them gauge relative and absolute risk from coastal threats. So we developed the CWR APACCT 20 Index for two scenarios – one at 1.5°C that we will lock-in and another at 4°C that we must try to avoid.

Besides these best and base cases, we also show you how to use our index to look at worst-case scenarios for 2100 and 2200. Dive in!

The report also includes:

• Why create the index + who & why the sector provided input;
• In-depth analysis of absolute & relative chronic tail risks from coastal threats for 20 APAC cities;
• Best, base and worst case CWR APACCT 20 Index rankings to benchmark chronic risks:
• Ranking of 20 cities with & without government adaptation efforts so that you can gauge government action;
• Benchmarking methodology and finance sector feedback which shaped the index. This includes which climate scenario to use; which physical threat factors and proxy indicators to use; plus weightings of different indicators;
• Key challenges regarding data gaps, consistency and how they were resolved; and
• What these tools are missing and how they can be improved to be more useful for finance.

A lot of time and effort from multiple parties went into building methodology consensus and producing the index, so do use it to to gauge relative risk across APAC. See which cities are ahead and which cities are behind in surviving our rising seas – access the full report.

This index underpins the CWR Coastal Capital Threat Series, five reports in total, that seeks to explore and assess the absolute and relative chronic tail risks from coastal threats so that they can be factored into sovereign and corporate credit risk ratings as well as equity/project valuations. We recommend your read this index report along with the city factsheets for a more complete view of the threats ahead.

To access other reports in the CWR Coastal Capital Threat Series, please click here.

To access Media Pack – please click here.