How climate shocks could break the economy - Edmond Rhys Jones

You're listening to TED talks daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host Elise Hugh. In 2021 while the world reeled from devastating floods and record breaking droughts, an investor asked an uncomfortable question.

你每天都在听TED演讲，我们每天都会给你带来新的想法，激发你的好奇心。2021年当世界因毁灭性的洪水和破纪录的干旱而摇摇欲坠时，一位投资者提出了一个令人不安的问题。

Is solving climate change really worth it? In this talk, climate pathfinder Edmond Rhys Jones digs into the question, revealing the massive gap between what science tells us about the climate crisis and how the economy measures its impact. Edmond shares why this is a moment for us to rethink how we model, predict and prepare for the turbulence ahead.

解决气候变化真的值得吗？在这场气候谈话中，探路者埃德蒙·瑞斯·琼斯深入探讨了这个问题，揭示了科学告诉我们的气候危机与经济如何衡量其影响之间的巨大差距。Edmund分享了为什么现在是我们重新思考如何建模、预测和准备未来动荡的时刻。

2021 was a bad year for natural disasters. That was the year that floods killed seventeen hundred people in Pakistan and Europe began what would be the worst drought in 500 years.

2021年是自然灾害频发的一年。那一年，洪水在巴基斯坦造成1700人死亡，欧洲开始了500年来最严重的干旱。

And that was the year one of my clients turned to me and said, is it really worth solving climate change? Well, look, he was an investor. What he wanted to understand was the economic return on the trillions of dollars we have to spend to get to net zero?

那一年，我的一位客户转向我说，解决气候变化真的值得吗？好吧，你看，他是个投资者。他想了解的是，为了实现净零排放，我们必须花费数万亿美元，而这笔钱的经济回报是什么？

So that's a good question, right?

所以这是个好问题，对吧？

And there's a good answer.

有一个很好的答案。

But I also found a problem.

但我也发现了一个问题。

You see, there's a huge gap between the science and the economics.

你看，科学和经济学之间存在着巨大的鸿沟。

The science is scary and it's really detailed. The science tells us that we're leaving 12,000 years of climate stability behind us. Those floods and those droughts are going to get more frequent and more intense.

科学很可怕，而且非常详细。科学告诉我们，我们将失去1.2万年的气候稳定。这些洪水和干旱将变得更加频繁和严重。

Crops may fail, fisheries collapse.

农作物可能歉收，渔业可能崩溃。

But then when you turn to the economics， all that turbulence and that kind of disruption just seems to get lost in translation.

但当你转向经济学时，所有这些动荡和破坏似乎都在翻译中消失了。

You find yourself looking at graphs with suspiciously smooth curves, rising temperatures, steadily declining growth.

你发现自己看到的图表曲线异常平滑，温度上升，增长稳步下降。

Now, those graphs do tell us something really important.

现在，这些图表确实告诉我们一些非常重要的事情。

There really is a connection between global warming and our ability to build things and make things and just get things done and the damages from that get really big, really quickly.

全球变暖与我们建造东西、制造东西、完成事情的能力之间确实存在联系，而由此造成的损害会非常大，非常快。

But when I turned that analysis into my first quadrillion Dollar slide for my client, it left him cold.

但当我把这个分析变成我为客户准备的第一张千万亿美元的幻灯片时，他却很冷淡。

You see, the problem with economics is that it's robust.

你看，经济学的问题在于它很稳健。

But it doesn't actually do a very good job of explaining how in practice.

但它实际上并不能很好地解释实践中的方法。

Climate change will impact businesses and households in the real economy, and that's why all that turbulence and disruption you expect to see, but you actually need to see, if you want to prepare, seems to disappear.

气候变化将对实体经济中的企业和家庭产生影响，这就是为什么你预期会看到但实际上如果你想做好准备就必须看到的那些动荡和混乱似乎都消失了。

So that's what I want to talk to you all about today.

这就是我今天想和大家谈谈的。

Imagine we had as good an understanding of the impact of climate change on the economy as we have of climate change itself, just as convincing and just as useful.

想象一下，如果我们对气候变化对经济的影响的理解，能像对气候变化本身的理解一样透彻，并且同样具有说服力和实用性，那该多好。

So let's start with natural disasters.

让我们从自然灾害开始。

The big insurers estimate that natural disasters cause about 200 to 300billion dollars worth of damages, direct damages every year. And these numbers are certainly more tangible. You know, you can see the collapsed bridges and the flooded mines in the data.

大型保险公司估计，自然灾害每年造成约2000亿至3000亿美元的直接损失。这些数字当然更具体。你知道，你可以在数据中看到倒塌的桥梁和淹没的矿井。

But they're also incomplete.

但它们也是不完整的。

Where are the lost revenues for the factories that relied on that mine or the lost income for the workers that needed that bridge to get to work? In fact, if we compare those numbers with that quadrillion Dollar slide, we can see we're missing about 80% of the problem.

依赖该矿的工厂的收入损失在哪里，需要这座桥才能上班的工人的收入损失又在哪里？事实上，如果我们将这些数字与千万亿美元的幻灯片进行比较，我们可以看到我们错过了大约80%的问题。

So this is what we need to do. We need to take a bit of a step back.

所以这就是我们需要做的。我们需要退一步。

And then we need to focus on the commercial relationships, the financial mechanisms that actually link companies together and transmit climate impacts around the economy.

然后，我们需要关注商业关系，即将公司联系在一起并将气候影响传递给经济的金融机制。

So now, instead of chasing hurricanes as they rampage through the physical infrastructure, we’re going to trace them as they reverberate through the financial infrastructure.

所以现在，我们不再追逐肆虐实体基础设施的飓风，而是要追踪它们对金融基础设施的影响。

And I know chasing hurricanes sounds more fun, but honestly, this is when you're going to start seeing some of that turbulence and that disruption that we're looking for.

我知道追逐飓风听起来更有趣，但老实说，这是你开始看到我们正在寻找的一些动荡和破坏的时候。

To take the American southeast, right, we all know that hurricanes regularly cause billions of dollars of damage along the coast.

以美国东南部为例，我们都知道飓风经常在海岸造成数十亿美元的损失。

But it doesn't stop there or then.

但它不会就此止步。

Insurance premiums are rising as a result across the region.

因此，整个地区的保险费都在上涨。

And many households, particularly those on low income, many of whom are actually inland, can't keep up.

许多家庭，尤其是低收入家庭，其中许多实际上在内陆，无法跟上。

So now we see rising mortgage defaults and credit card delinquency, and this is causing problems for another set of financial institutions.

所以现在我们看到抵押贷款违约和信用卡拖欠率上升，这给另一组金融机构带来了问题。

Or take the coffee industry in 2021, again, it was a bad year.

以再以 2021 年的咖啡行业为例，那又是糟糕的一年。

A major frost and drought caused coffee production in Brazil to fall by 20%.

严重的霜冻和干旱导致巴西咖啡产量下降了 20%。

But prices went up 30% globally in just one week, and then they kept on rising. Why? Why this kind of overreaction?

但全球价格在短短一周内上涨了30%，然后继续上涨。为什么？为什么会有这种过度反应？

Well, it started when many farmers walked away from their forward contracts and forward contracts are actually there to provide price stability between coffee farmers coffee buyers.

好吧，它始于许多农民放弃远期合约，远期合约实际上是为了在咖啡农和咖啡买家之间提供价格稳定。

But when some farmers saw higher profits available on the open market, they left their buyers in the lurch. And so now the buyers can't meet their own onward commitments into the futures market, so they're scrambling to find cash to keep those positions open.

但当一些农民在公开市场上看到更高的利润时，他们让买家陷入困境。因此，现在买家无法履行自己对期货市场的进一步承诺，所以他们争先恐后地寻找现金来保持这些头寸的开放。

They're scrambling to find new coffee supplies to meet them, and it's driving the price up higher and higher.

他们争先恐后地寻找新的咖啡供应来满足他们的需求，这导致价格越来越高。

So these are just two disparate examples of how climate change causes turbulence in our financial infrastructure.

所以这些只是气候变化导致我们的金融基础设施动荡的两个不同例子。

But the real worry?

但真正的担忧是什么？

Is that the financial infrastructure itself will break under rising pressure.

金融基础设施本身也会在不断上升的压力下崩溃。

Because we're going to see more extreme weather in the next 10 years than we saw in the last 10 years. Those shocks are going to grow and the gaps between them are going to shrink.

因为未来十年我们将看到比过去十年更多的极端天气。这些冲击将会加剧，它们之间的差距将会缩小。

And we can already see some of the warning signs.

我们已经可以看到一些警告信号。

In Florida, several insurers have now gone bankrupt or they've pulled out. And now the state is the single largest provider of home insurance in Florida putting pressure on its budget.

在佛罗里达州，多家保险公司已经破产或撤出市场。如今，州政府本身已成为佛罗里达州最大的房屋保险提供商，这给州政府的预算带来了巨大压力。

In California, climate risks are driving up the cost of borrowing for many of the local authorities that actually need to invest in preventing those risks.

在加利福尼亚州，气候风险推高了许多地方政府的借贷成本，而这些地方政府实际上需要投资来预防这些风险。

So we may be heading towards a tipping point, at which point, the financial infrastructure can't manage climate risk anymore.

因此，我们可能正走向一个临界点，届时金融基础设施将无法再应对气候风险。

And this isn't academic, because if we can't manage climate risk, we can't do a lot of things.

这不是学术性的，因为如果我们不能管理气候风险，我们就无法做很多事情。

Imagine trying to get a mortgage on a house that you can't ensure.

想象一下，你试图为一栋你无法保证的房子申请抵押贷款。

You can't sell one that's become uninsurable, for that matter.

就这一点而言，你不能卖掉一个无法投保的。

You know, at scale, this is major disruption.

你知道，从规模上讲，这是一次重大的破坏。

And this isn't the normal boom and bust cycle.

这不是正常的繁荣和萧条周期。

This is just bust, bust, broken.

这只是破产，破产，破产。

So this may all sound a bit melodramatic to some of you. You know that extreme?

所以，对你们中的一些人来说，这一切听起来可能有点夸张。你知道那种极端吗？

And that's fair enough. There's a very real debate right now between a growing set of voices that are worrying about these kinds of tipping points and those that say, don't worry, the financial system as a whole will be able to manage climate risk for many decades to come.

这很公平。现在，越来越多的人担心这些临界点，而另一些人则说，别担心，整个金融体系将能够在未来几十年内管理气候风险，这两者之间存在着非常真实的争论。

But I think for our purposes, in a way it doesn't matter because there's huge benefit in being able to better anticipate the turbulence ahead either way.

但我认为，就我们的目的而言，这在某种程度上并不重要，因为无论如何，能够更好地预测未来的动荡都将带来巨大的好处。

And I think the first step in being able to better anticipate the future is recognizing that many of the tools and techniques that we've traditionally relied on, though we really have the imagination to do so.

我认为，要更好地预测未来，第一步是认识到我们传统上依赖的许多工具和技术，尽管我们确实有想象力这样做。

They're really rooted in the status quo, historical data, past trends.

他们真的植根于现状、历史数据和过去的趋势。

So what we need to do is look to other complex, dynamic systems and the way those are studied, like evolutionary biology, or thermodynamics, ironically, environmental science, energy networks.

所以我们需要做的是研究其他复杂、动态的系统以及研究这些系统的方法，例如进化生物学、热力学、具有讽刺意味的是，环境科学、能源网络。

And the field of complexity economics does exactly this. It borrows tools and techniques from those other areas of study, and uses them to better anticipate how shocks and trends can reshape economies.

复杂性经济学领域正是这样做的。它借鉴了其他研究领域的工具和技术，并利用它们更好地预测冲击和趋势如何重塑经济。

And one of the, of course, climate change is both of those things, right? Because you've got falling productivity, rising risk punctuated by natural disasters.

当然，气候变化就是这两件事，对吧？因为生产力下降，风险上升，自然灾害不时发生。

And one of the key tools that many of these fields use are simulations, and in this context, you should be thinking of them as digital twins, of whatever system it is that you're studying.

许多此类领域使用的关键工具之一是模拟，在这种情况下，你应该将它们视为你所研究的任何系统的数字孪生体。

They're populated with thousands of virtual actors, each with their own rules of behavior and, critically, the connections between them.

他们有成千上万的虚拟演员，每个人都有自己的行为规则，关键的是，他们之间的联系。

You set them up and you let them run. You can test them against reality and calibrate them.

你设置它们，然后让它们跑。你可以根据现实来测试它们并校准它们。

And then you can run experiments. What would happen if we had a different setup? What will happen in future? So urban planners use simulations to prove that sometimes demolishing a major road can actually ease traffic congestion.

然后你可以进行实验。如果我们有不同的设置，会发生什么？未来会发生什么？因此，城市规划者使用模拟来证明，有时拆除一条主要道路实际上可以缓解交通拥堵。

Ecologists use simulations to show why fish stocks can collapse even after you've put fish quotas in place.

生态学家使用模拟来说明为什么即使在制定了鱼类配额后，鱼类种群也会崩溃。

The important thing about both of those results is that they're unexpected. They're not intuitive.

这两个结果的关键在于它们的出乎意料，并非人们直觉所能预料的。

And this is what we need.

这正是我们所需要的。

Where global warming meets the global economy.

全球变暖与全球经济相遇的地方。

From our systems thinkers, from our risk modelers, from our data scientists, we need models that surprise us before the future does.

从我们的系统思考者、风险建模者和数据科学家那里，我们需要在未来之前让我们感到惊讶的模型。

Because once we've done that, there's a whole bunch of things that we can do to better manage the disruption ahead.

因为一旦我们做到了这一点，我们就可以做很多事情来更好地应对未来的混乱局面。

I'll give you one quick example. Imagine insurance that just pays out to farmers as soon as they're hit by natural disaster.

我给你举一个简单的例子。想象一下，一旦农民遭受自然灾害，保险就会向他们支付。

They're back on their feet, minimal impact on their customers. Well, this product exists. It's called parametric insurance. But the challenge is scaling it up because you've got to find terms are going to work for thousands, tens of thousands of farmers year after year, shock after shock.

他们已经恢复正常运营，对客户的影响微乎其微。其实，这种产品已经存在，叫做参数型保险。但挑战在于如何扩大规模，因为你必须找到能够让成千上万的农民年复一年、经受住一次又一次冲击的条款。

But now imagine you've got a simulation of, say, the coffee industry, and you can test those terms against the shocks of the past and about potential futures.

但现在想象一下，你有一个模拟，比如说，咖啡行业的模拟，你可以用过去的冲击和未来的潜在影响来检验这些条件。

And that's just one of several innovations that could make the financial infrastructure of the coffee industry more resilient. And we need exactly that kind of innovation across the real economy.

这只是可以使咖啡行业的金融基础设施更具弹性的几项创新之一。我们在整个实体经济中都需要这种创新。

With the right tools, what felt like an impenetrable fog of uncertainty starts to feel like a landscape ripe for opportunity.

有了正确的工具，感觉像是无法穿透的不确定性迷雾开始感觉像是机会成熟的景观。

So what would I say to my client today?

那么，今天我该对我的客户说些什么呢？

Well, firstly, the economic case for climate action is clear.

首先，气候行动的经济理由是明确的。

We're talking about safeguarding maybe 25% of global GDP between now and 2100.

我们正在谈论的是，从现在到2100年，保护可能占全球GDP的25%。

But there's a second investment case.

但还有第二个投资案例。

In building resilience to the financial turbulence that we're going to experience on the way, because climate change is now inevitable, at least for the next 75 years.

为了增强我们对即将经历的金融动荡的抵御能力，因为气候变化现在是不可避免的，至少在未来75年内是如此。

But the scale of the economic disruption is not. And what we build together, the models, the new products, the collaborations, will determine how much we spend clearing up the messes we go, and how much we can invest in actually solving the problem.

但经济动荡的规模并非如此。我们共同构建的模式、新产品和合作项目，将决定我们花多少钱来收拾残局，以及我们能投入多少资金来真正解决问题。

Thank you so much for your time.

非常感谢您抽出时间。

That was Edmond Rhys Jones at TED at BCG in Dubai in 2025.

那是埃德蒙·里斯·琼斯在 2025 年迪拜 BCG 举办的 TED 大会上的演讲。