Chapter 2

Leader: Ray Joseph Regulacion

Members:
Justine Dela Rama
Arlo Binalayo
Angela Comediero
Chester Josh Lauzon

New buildings will have to be designed to cope

with the effects of climate change. These include warmer
weather in which keeping cool will be important, more
extreme and wet weather, and increased subsidence risk.
Flood risk areas will increase, requiring measures for
both resistance for initial protection and resilience for
rapid recovering. At the same time, new buildings must
use less fossil fuel in a low or zero-carbon world. Homes,
offices, schools and other buildings will need to maximise
passive measures of more effective insulation, improved
airtightness and greater thermal mass. They will also
need to make more use of solar energy and other
renewable inputs. New buildings will incorporate a range
of new technologies to reduce their energy use, and to
cut the energy needed to build them, including the
embodied energy in the materials they contain. (Roberts,
2008), retrieved from
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030
1421508004813 )

The impacts of climate change on different sectors

of society are interrelated. Drought can harm food
production and human health. Flooding can lead to
disease spread and damages to ecosystems and
infrastructure. Human health issues can increase
mortality, impact food availability, and limit worker
productivity. Climate change impacts are seen throughout
every aspect of the world we live in. However, climate
change impacts are uneven across the country and the
world — even within a single community, climate change
impacts can differ between neighborhoods or individuals.
Long-standing socioeconomic inequities can make 
underserved groups, who often have the highest exposure
to hazards and the fewest resources to respond, more
vulnerable.  (2021) retrieved from
(https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/cli
mate/climate-change-impacts)

From the poles to the tropics, climate change is

disrupting ecosystems. Even a seemingly slight shift in
temperature can cause dramatic changes that ripple
through food webs and the environment.

Melting sea ice

The effects of climate change are most apparent in the
world’s coldest regions—the poles. The Arctic is heating
up twice as fast as anywhere else on earth, leading to the
rapid melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets, where a
massive amount of water is stored. As sea ice melts,
darker ocean waters that absorb more sunlight become
exposed, creating a positive feedback loop that speeds up
the melting process. In just 15 years, the Arctic could be
entirely ice-free in the summer.

Sea level rise

Scientists predict that melting sea ice and glaciers, as well
as the fact that warmer water expands in volume, could
cause sea levels to rise as much as 3.61 feet by the end of
the century, should we fail to curb emissions. The extent
(and pace) of this change would devastate low-lying
regions, including island nations and densely populated
coastal cities like New York City and Mumbai.

But sea level rise at far lower levels is still costly,

dangerous, and disruptive. Scientists predict that the
United States will see a foot of sea level rise by 2050,
which will regularly damage infrastructure, like roads,
sewage treatment plants, and even power plants. Beaches
that families have grown up visiting may be gone by the
end of the century. Sea level rise also harms the
environment, as encroaching seawater can both erode
coastal ecosystems and invade freshwater inland aquifers,
which we rely on for agriculture and drinking water.
Saltwater incursion is already reshaping life in nations
like Bangladesh, where one-quarter of the lands lie less
than 7 feet above sea level. (Lindwall, 2018)

Humans have doubled levels of reactive

nitrogen in circulation, largely as a result of fertilizer
application and fossil fuel burning. This massive
alteration of the nitrogen cycle affects climate, food
security, energy security, human health and ecosystem
services. Our estimates show that nitrogen currently leads
to a net-cooling effect on climate with very high
uncertainty. The many complex warming and cooling
interactions between nitrogen and climate need to be
better assessed, taking also into account the other effects
of nitrogen on human health, environment and ecosystem
services. Through improved nitrogen management
substantial reductions in atmospheric greenhouse gas
concentrations could be generated, also allowing for other
co-benefits, including improving human health and
improved provision of ecosystem services, for example
clean air and water, and biodiversity. (Erisman, et al.
2011)

We examine factors associated with the US S&P 500

firms' decisions to disclose information about the current
and projected effects of climate change to institutional
investors. Through the Carbon Disclosure Project, 315
institutional investors representing 41 trillion USD in
assets asked the largest public firms to respond to a
questionnaire about climate change. We explore
whether firms' disclosures directed specifically to
institutional investors are related to factors that have
been found to explain voluntary disclosures to investors
in general. In particular, we consider factors related to
the level of scrutiny, since extant literature predicts that
the cost of not disclosing increases with level of scrutiny.
(Stanny, 2008) retrieved from
(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/csr.175
)

Philippines is the third most vulnerable country to

climate change according to the 2017 world risk report.
Impacts of climate change in the Philippines are
immense, including: annual losses in GDP, changes in
rainfall patterns and distribution, droughts, threats to
biodiversity and food security, sea level rise, public
health risks, and endangerment of vulnerable groups
such as women and indigenous people. (2017) retrieved
from (https://niccdies.climate.gov.ph/climate-change-
impacts#:~:text=Impacts%20of%20climate%20change
%20in,as%20women%20and%20indigenous%20people )

Climate change is one of the most fundamental

challenges ever to confront humanity. Its adverse
impacts are already being seen and may intensify
exponentially over time if nothing is done to reduce
further emissions of greenhouse gases. Decisively dealing
NOW with climate change is key to ensuring sustainable
development, poverty eradication and safeguarding
economic growth. Scientific assessments indicate that
the cost of inaction now will be more costly in the future.
Thus, economic development needs to be shifted to a
low-carbon emission path. (2023) retrieved from
(https://www.pagasa.dost.gov.ph/information/climate-
change-in-the-philippines )

The Philippines is among the top ten countries

vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change.
Because the geography of the Philippines is composed of
numerous islands, the risk posed by natural hazards
caused by the changing climate is high according to the
2019 report of the Institute for Economics and Peace.

Due to this, companies are concerned about how this will

affect them currently and in the future. Climate change
can cause stronger and more frequent typhoons to hit
the country, especially as it is situated on the west of the
Pacific Ocean. Typhoons originate over warm tropical
oceans [2]. Thus, this makes the Philippines, a tropical
country, susceptible to typhoons. Global warming can
also cause sea levels to rise, which can flood low-lying
areas (e.g., coastal cities like Metro Manila), and this is a
major concern too. Metro Manila, where the
consumption, infrastructure, manufacturing, and income
of the country are concentrated [3], has some parts
predicted to be submerged in water by 2050 from a 2019
study of Climate Central. (2020) retrieved from
(https://enviliance.com/regions/southeast-asia/ph/ph-
climate-change )

The extreme weather events triggered by climate

change may cause economic damage that would affect
Filipinos living in the poverty threshold, a study of the
Asian Development Bank (ADB) found.

According to Maki Pulido's report on "24 Oras" on Friday,

the ADB's Climate Risk Country Profile showed the
extreme hazards brought about by the weather events
may negatively impact the country's vulnerable sectors
including the agriculture and poor families.
"We would expect to see, you know, a large share of the
population vulnerable to falling into poverty," ADB
Country Manager Kelly Bird said. "It might be temporary
but we might expect reducing poverty is going to be
more challenging under these adverse impacts of climate
change". (Pulido, 2023)

From scorching heatwaves to unusually heavy

downpours, extreme weather events have caused
widespread upheaval across the globe this year, with
thousands of people killed and millions more displaced.

In the last three months, monsoon rains unleashed

disastrous flooding in Bangladesh, and brutal heatwaves
seared parts of South Asia and Europe. Meanwhile,
prolonged drought has left millions on the brink of
famine in East Africa.

Much of this, scientists say, is what's expected from

climate change.
On Tuesday, a team of climate scientists published a
study in the journal Environmental Research: Climate.
The researchers scrutinized the role climate change has
played in individual weather events over the past two
decades.

The findings confirm warnings of how global warming will

change our world, and also make clear what information
is missing.

For heatwaves and extreme rainfall, "we find we have a

much better understanding of how the intensity of these
events is changing due to climate change," said study co-
author Luke Harrington, a climate scientist at Victoria
University of Wellington.

Less understood, however, is how climate change

influences wildfires and drought.

For their review paper, scientists drew upon hundreds of

"attribution" studies, or research that aims to calculate
how climate change affected an extreme event using
computer simulations and weather observations.

There are also large data gaps in many low- and middle-
income countries, making it harder to understand what's
happening in those regions, said co-author Friederike
Otto, one of the climatologists leading the international
research collaboration World Weather Attribution
(WWA).(Dickie, 2022)