Opinion
Cities have much to learn from Singapore and Copenhagen on climate adaptation
Summary
- As climate effects start kicking in, policy attention is turning to resilience. The world’s best adapted cities teach us that when a government focuses on resilience and adaptation with a credible plan, funding will follow.
Raise your hand if you’ve been victimized by bad weather in the last year or so. Was your travel disrupted? Did your home get unbearably hot? Have you been impacted by flooding? When I asked these questions at a panel event recently, only a lucky few in the audience kept their hands down.
Even if we weren’t individually experiencing climate change, we’d want our communities to avoid tragedies. After all, societies can’t thrive underwater, which is why the Netherlands has excellent flood management systems.
Yet, emissions from burning fossil fuels are baking the planet and its impacts are coming at us thick and fast. In many cases, we need to prepare and adapt with more urgency than planned.
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Take the example of the UK, where I live. In April 2023, the government brought forward deadlines for raising tidal flood defences upstream of the Thames Barrier by 15 years to 2050 because sea levels are rising faster than projected.
In 2021, the UK’s Climate Change Risk Assessment said “there is a very small chance" of the UK exceeding 40° Celsius by 2040. In 2022, temperatures rose to a record 40.3° Celsius.
The London Climate Resilience Review, commissioned by Mayor Sadiq Khan and chaired by Emma Howard Boyd, former head of the Environment Agency, pulled no punches when it laid out the multiple “lethal" risks for Londoners, concluding that the UK’s capital is underprepared for more frequent, overlapping and severe climate impacts.
Adaptation, the process of adjusting our lives and infrastructure to the effects of climate change, was once mitigation’s controversial cousin. Now, it’s a necessary evil. Some considered it a taboo topic out of fear that it accepted the damage done to our planet and minimized the critical need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The money spent on adaptation lags way behind allocations for mitigation. A 2024 climate finance report from the Climate Policy Initiative found that while mitigation finance totalled $1.3 trillion globally in 2022, adaptation finance reached just $76 billion. The vast majority comes from public funds. Yet, given the scale of the issue, it’s clear that there’s a need for private sector involvement.
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Even though adaptation is now considered essential by experts, it’s seen as less investable than mitigation—particularly when the focus of private finance is revenue generation. But as three reports on adaptation financing found, there are a couple of urban centres that London and other UK cities could learn from: Singapore and Copenhagen.
London’s approach to adaptation relies heavily on public funding with limited private money, while climate policy itself is fragmented and unstable, according to a co-author of the reports, Raffaele Della Croce, co-director of the Singapore Green Finance Centre and a research fellow at the Centre for Climate Finance and Investment, Imperial College Business School.
Singapore has an ambitious whole-government approach to climate adaptation, committing $74 billion to the task by the end of the century. This, alongside sustainable planning frameworks and the involvement of its central bank, creates a sense of urgency and regulatory certainty.
With a clear route to adaptation, the city-state has built protective infrastructure such as its Marina Barrage and houses more nature in its urban environment to protect against storm surges and heatwaves.
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, the Cloudburst Management Plan, designed after a devastating once-in-1,000-year rainfall event to help the city better cope with excess water, has led to effective transformation across the city.
The use of natural solutions—trees, ponds and soil—also helps address other climate hazards such as extreme heat. To pay for it, the Danish city adopted an innovative finance scheme, utilizing a water tariff and municipal pooled-credit facility.
Failing to embed adaptation measures into climate plans will cause problems. Many have blamed the removal of dams for the tragic flooding in Valencia and other parts of Spain. The stonking deluge of rain, likely intensified by climate change, was ultimately the real hazard—but had dams been in place, it may not have had such devastating consequences.
The final report is full of detailed recommendations for the government, financial institutions and investors, including ways to mobilize more private capital with innovative financial instruments and improved climate risk assessments.
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But there’s a simple lesson to be learnt from places successfully adjusting to the crisis: When the government promotes adaptation and focuses on resilience in its standards and regulation, enthusiasm and money may follow. ©Bloomberg
