Jun. 17, 2022
I am writing both professionally and personally. Professionally, I know that the built environment can have a major impact on health. The location of highways, factories, refineries, and other structures built by humans really impacts our health. They are not \"silos\" where factories only affect economic output for that company, but the factory can have profound effects on the health of the surrounding community. For example, air pollution (PM2.5, ozone, and nitrogen oxides) increases death and illness rates for a large variety of health problems: asthma, emphysema, heart attacks, heart failure, strokes, dementia, low birth weight, cognitive development in children, cognitive performance in adults, diabetes, obesity, lung growth in children, and autism. Air pollution and climate change also have profound impacts on crop yields, work absences, and worker productivity. This is especially true for outdoor workers including those in the agricultural, construction, horticultural, and power sectors. The same is true for climate change. How we operate our businesses currently has huge impacts on human health now, and will have huge effects in the future on the health and wellbeing of people who are children today. In addition to the impacts of health, climate change will have major impacts on earnings and profits of companies: are they insuring hotels near the coast that could get destroyed by a hurricane, are they in an area prone to wildfires, will they have to rebuild or relocate if there is a major flood or storm where their facilities are located, will their health care costs increase because more workers or retirees are suffering from heat illness or heart conditions made worse by extreme heat, and so much more. Investors who care about social determinants of health need to be able to see how climate risk will impact a company's future earnings, and they also need to see how much a company is contributing to climate change. Likewise, since climate changes has such dire threats to the economy and each company's profits, any investor needs to know how much risk the company is exposed to because of climate change and what they are doing to address that risk. Personally, much of my retirement savings are in stocks and mutual funds. I would like to know how much risk exposure from climate change the companies and funds in which I invest have. I would like to know if my retirement investments will be reduced because a financial institution is providing insurance to a hotel or building in a high risk area. I want to be able to invest in companies and mutual funds that are looking at future safety and whether climate change will impact that company's profitability. I want to have decent retirement investments that are not reduced by a company having to rebuild one of its facilities. aI want to invest in companies and mutual funds that don't just look at the next quarter or next year, but at whether they will be here for when I retire, and for my children to invest in.