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Advancing adaptation: Mapping costs from cooling to coastal defenses estimates the costs of climate adaptation using a granular, geospatial analysis and examining 20 proven, cost-effective adaptation measures.
The McKinsey Global Institute analyzed how nine climate hazards manifest today and how their patterns might shift as the world warms, in an effort to understand the costs and benefits of adaptation.
We find that today, about 40 percent of the Earth’s landmass experiences hazards including severe heat, destructive wildfires, prolonged drought, and severe flooding, which are rooted in current local patterns of weather extremes.1 Heat, wildfires, and drought affect wide swaths of land, while flooding hazards are often more localized, shaped by geography, coastlines, and local rainfall. In addition, some 35 percent of the world’s terrain experiences freezing days (see sidebar, “The hazards we examine”). In response, many places around the world have implemented measures to adapt to these hazards.
Yet today’s view offers only a snapshot of what is actually a moving picture. Global temperature increases of 1.5°C and 2°C, anticipated by roughly 2030 and 2050, respectively, under the current trajectory of global emissions, will cause kaleidoscopic local shifts.2
Importantly, change will occur, but not everywhere, not in the same way, and not all at once. While many hazards will spread across more parts of the world, some will not. Freezing is expected to decline, and in some small areas, drought or flood risks may also decrease—even while increasing in others. Hazards may not shift in the same way, either. Many will intensify, lengthen, or happen more frequently as the planet warms, but the scale of the change and where it occurs will vary. For example, regions like Latin America and parts of emerging Asia could face much longer periods of heat stress at 2°C, whereas India, already subject to prolonged heat conditions, is likely to see a smaller relative increase. Finally, exposure to hazards won’t increase all at once; more places are expected to become exposed between now and 1.5°C, and still more by 2°C.
The following hazard spotlights explain where, when, and how each type of hazard could change as global temperatures rise from current levels to 1.5°C and 2°C above preindustrial levels. For each hazard, we highlight the change, whether in intensity, frequency, or duration, that matters most for guiding adaptation planning.3 Naturally, the prevalence of a hazard does not necessarily mean places need to or will adapt to it, but understanding today’s patterns of extreme weather and their evolution is the first step in adaptation planning.
In doing this work, we could define hazards in many ways, influencing the results shown here. Since our focus is on understanding and quantifying adaptation costs, we define hazards using protection standards typically established in developed economies. And, of course, even though all the hazards examined here are considered meaningful enough to protect against, they are not all created equal, and their impact can be very different. For example, heat stress events are prolonged periods of high heat or humidity, lasting more than a month each year, that broadly affect labor productivity and health. By contrast, heat waves are rare, short-lived, localized extreme heat events that particularly put vulnerable populations at risk.
Since we aren’t climate scientists, we rely on external climate models, primarily those used in the sixth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).4 In using these models, we have employed standard techniques to manage uncertainties inherent in climate modeling, though we recognize that important residual uncertainties remain (see the technical appendix for more details). Thus, the results presented here are not high-resolution predictions of climate hazards in specific places around the world. Rather, they are directional assessments of how hazards could evolve. This serves as the basis for our order-of-magnitude assessment of adaptation costs and benefits across the world.

