‘Punjab in world’s top 50 at risk of damage due to climate hazards’

Bathinda: Punjab is among the top 50 states or provinces across the world at high risk of damage to built environment due to climate hazards. This has come to the fore in a report, ‘Gross Domestic Climate Risk’, released on Monday by Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI), part of a group of companies committed to quantifying and communicating the costs of climate change, and calculating physical climate risk to built environment in over 2,600 states and provinces around the world in 2050.
Built environment refers to aspects of surroundings that are built by humans to support human activity, like homes and workplaces. It covers damage to buildings and properties from extreme weather and climate change such as flooding, forest fires, heat wave and sea level rise.
This is the first time there has been a physical climate risk analysis focused exclusively on built environment, comparing every state, province and territory in the world. The gross domestic climate risk (GDCR) analysis focuses on the extent of capital value at risk from extreme weather and climate change in states, provinces and other territories, represented by vulnerability and exposure of built environment.
XDI has released a first-pass analysis of GDCR, which found that 80% of the top-50 most-at-risk states and provinces in 2050 are in China, US and India.
Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Kerala are other Indian states that fall in the top 50. In all, India has nine states as most disturbed on the count. In all, Asia dominates the list of provinces at risk by aggregated damage ratio, with more than half (114) of the top 200 in 2050 in this region.
South Asia has 24 of the top 200. After China and India, Pakistan has multiple provinces in the top 100, including Sindh. Devastating flooding between June and August 2022 affected 30% area of Pakistan and partially or fully damaged more than 900,000 houses in Sindh province.