So 40 percent of the world’s population live near the coast.
So you’ve got sea level rise, intense storms
and, by some estimates,
half a billion to a billion people will be adversely affected
by what's going to happen in the coast.
But that's not the only problem.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
It's not just storms are increasing,
sea level rise is going to flood these areas.
You have secondary issues,
such as acidification that's going to damage coral reefs
and natural systems.
You have changing wind patterns because ocean temperatures are increasing
and storms are getting more intense and also more unpredictable.
And on top of that, you've got increased rainfall
and flooding that is happening deeper in the coast
in coastal communities.
This is a big problem.
And it's a personal problem for me as well.
I'm from Singapore, an island state in Southeast Asia.
Many coastal communities.
I worry about what's going to happen to my region,
how it's going to impact my family.
I've got three boys that, you know, have grown up along the coast.
And with that, I've spent the last two years
helping countries and coastal communities build resilience against climate change.
What's the challenge?
The challenge is no two coasts are alike.
They are highly diverse, physically diverse.
They have different distributions of populations.
And they are socioeconomically different
in terms of the communities that live there.
Now, there are many solutions to protect the coast.
You have seawalls, storm barriers.
We can restore mangroves.
And this can protect the coast.
The challenge is not so much the solutions.
The challenge is actually what's the right mix of solutions
that fits the local context
and delivers the highest socioeconomic return.
Now, let me illustrate this with an example.
I worked with a government in Southeast Asia,
a country with a large population, diverse set of islands,
many coastal communities, spread across.
And one region in particular faced a complex interplay of challenges.
Rising sea levels that were causing permanent flooding.
Increasing storms that were damaging the coast.
A large proportion of vulnerable people, in poverty, living in low-lying areas.
On top of that, land subsidence had made matters worse.
So we worked with the government to model the impact of climate change
over the coming decades
to answer questions like:
Which parts of the coast will be flooded?
Which populations will be impacted?
Where would schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure be damaged?
How would this impact crops, water systems?
What would be the impact on natural ecosystems
that are important to this country.
And importantly, what this did was that it combined climate science
with data analytics,
with local context,
and linked it to socioeconomic impact.
Now, to give an example, one particular community faced the risk
of 100,000 people potentially being displaced
because of increasing sea levels.
Eight percent of the economy
and almost half of the region's wetland reserves
were at risk of being damaged.
Now, in addition, with this insight
the government was able to better understand the knock-on effects
that this would have on public health, on food security,
on forced migration.
So a lot of issues.
So what do you do about that?
I mean, this massive exposure and no clear answers in what you do,
and in a developing economy such as this,
massive trade-offs that you need to manage in terms of where you deploy resources.
So ...
Initially this region was looking at building seawalls,
having early warning systems, storm barriers in place
that required a fair bit of capital and investment.
In fact, what we found was that a mix of solutions were needed.
So that included mangrove restoration in selected areas as natural defense
and only in certain parts of the coast
investing to build storm barriers and seawalls.
Now with that, the region could consider --
with the same amount of resources, maximizing lives saved,
livelihoods protected and ecosystem safeguarded.
And on top of this, the cost of inaction, of not doing anything,
also meant massive negative impact for the private sector.
So private enterprises would have had billions of dollars of losses
with manufacturing, with critical infrastructure,
with commercial real estate being damaged.
Now, having a visibility on this,
the government could then engage the private sector
on codeveloping and cofunding solutions
that benefitted both private enterprise
and the local community.
Now, this is not a problem only in Southeast Asia.
A city in West Africa, for example, had similar challenges
but compounded with very dense populations along the coast,
severe land subsidence
and drainage challenges
that were exacerbated by poor solid waste management
in some parts of the city.
Now by integrating climate science data analytics to local context
and tightly linking this to socioeconomic impact,
the government was able to manage the trade-offs
on how you would balance the deployment of resources
to things such as:
Do I build more drainage infrastructure?
Do I relocate some populations to other parts?
Do I build storm barriers?
What's the right mix?
Now as you can see, this is a challenging and complex problem.
And when you look at it,
the challenge is every coast that you look at is different.
Right? They're socioeconomically, physically different.
And the most pressing challenges are often in developing countries
where they have limited capacity to adapt
and they have big trade-offs to manage.
On top of this, there are many technical solutions
and natural solutions out there.
You can protect the coast with mangrove restoration,
seawalls, storm barriers.
You can accommodate by flood-proofing buildings,
building drainage.
You can relocate people and critical infrastructure.
The challenge is not so much what are these solutions,
rather what's the right mix of solutions for any given context.
So by combining climate science, data analytics,
to local considerations, tightly to socioeconomic outcomes,
decision makers can really balance the trade-offs
and take the right actions over time
to be able to maximize lives saved,
livelihoods protected and natural ecosystems saved.
So with that ...
we could protect more people along the coast
and optimize the outcomes.
Thank you.
(Applause)