In early October 2013, hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, along with former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, launched a new initiative to assess the economic risk to the United States associated with climate change.
The initiative, called " Risky Business—The Economic Risks of Climate Change," will focus on two core components, as follows:
An independent risk assessment will combine existing data on the current and potential impacts of climate change with original research that will quantify potential future costs. The results, to be released in the summer of 2014, will reveal the likely financial risk the United States faces from unmitigated climate change.
An engagement effort will target the economic sectors most at risk from a changing climate, and begin the process of helping leaders from across these sectors prepare a measured response to the risks they face. The engagement will be led by a risk committee composed of top national and regional leaders from across the American economic and political spectrum.
The initiative grew out of concerns by the team that the United States has not developed sound risk assessment protocols related to climate change, which they describe as "one of the greatest humanitarian and economic challenges of our time." The management team intends to break down economic risk factors by region and by sector with a goal of arming decision-makers with information that quantifies climate change risk and allows educated risk tolerance decisions. Press coverage of the new initiative indicates that, ultimately, the goal of Risky Business is to substantiate from an economic perspective the benefits of carbon emissions control to limit the more catastrophic economic risks they believe will result from unchecked greenhouse gas emissions.
The format for the analysis will follow the blueprint used by New York City in its PlaNYC initiative, as further refined in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. First developed in 2007, PlaNYC began as a sustainable growth strategy for New York City, which included assessment of climate change risks facing this waterfront city. This summer, following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Bloomberg announced the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency ("SIRR") to evaluate how to rebuild the city to be more resilient in the face of climate change-related weather events. The SIRR will focus on both potential improvements to infrastructure and buildings to enhance climate change resilience in the medium and long term as well on how to support communities themselves to become more resilient. The lessons from PlaNYC and the SIRR will serve as a starting point for Risky Business's national climate change risk management initiative.
The Risky Business initiative intends to issue a report in 2014 documenting the risk assessment component of the analysis and to follow this work with development of climate change risk management measures designed according to sector and specific risk points.
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