NASA has recorded increasing wind intensity linked to climate change, which drives tropical cyclones.  The Americans are currently designing coastal defences robust enough to cope with the subsequent new magnitude of tropical storms there.  A warming earth with more frequent and more intense hurricanes has sent US cities and states scrambling to find ways to mitigate the potential damage — especially the devastating combination of record rainfall and flooding from storm surges. A key element is building better flood defences in coastal regions.  After Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of the city of New Orleans, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the body tasked with government-sponsored civil engineering projects in the US, began the process of rebuilding the levees that had been overwhelmed by the storm surge.  The earthen and concrete levees built around the city are now going to be between 10 feet and 32 feet tall and are set to be combined with some of the largest drainage pumps in the world.  The new defences should hold off storm surges until the year 2057. In Texas, the US Army Corps of Engineers is planning the biggest civil engineering project in the US to date, an ambitious effort to mitigate hurricane damage and protect the Galveston Bay area with a $31bn sea-based coastal barrier.  The largest part of the project, the “Ike Dike” is a 2-mile concrete gate system running along the coastline.  The dike design includes 100 ft tall concrete towers holding gates that can close to hold out storm surges when hurricanes strike.  As well as the gates, an existing seawall will be heightened.  The US Congress has approved the project and the cost will be spread between the US federal government and state and local bodies. I contrast that attitude with the UK where we appear to have given up on Brunel-style big engineering.  Managed retreat appears to be the order of the day — an acceptance that the investment required to maintain coastal defences versus the assets or population protected is either not cost-effective or can’t be prioritised versus other demands with a cash starved regulator (The Environment Agency) .  About 8,900 homes are threatened by coastal erosion in England, a risk that costs the economy £260m a year, according to the Government’s committee on climate change.  The number is expected to rise to 100,000 homes by 2080.  And a climate change report from the Met Office envisages sea levels in the southeast could rise by between 30 cm and 115 cm by 2100 (it also said winters would be wetter with more chance of flooding).  There is a significant population of climate migrants that we are accepting will have to relocate and that will not be without cost. Fairbourne in Wales is perhaps one of the clearest examples where in 30-40 years, all the properties could be vacant and with zero value. Indeed, since the early 1990s, sections of seawall along the Essex coastline have been deliberately breached and seawater allowed to flood in, creating areas of brackish land that may over time revert to salt marsh.  While these areas are sparsely populated, the quality of agricultural land is dramatically degraded and reverts to nature reserve or made redundant.  So the value changes and we need to be mindful that it doesn’t have to be a town that is threatened, it can also be farming communities. To be fair, the US gets far more extreme weather than us and the UK is not one of the top five countries at risk of climate change.  But it’s not just against the US that we come up short.  While vast swathes of East Anglia are below sea level, so is a quarter of the Netherlands. Whereas the Dutch are raising electrics and utilities (underneath overhead walkways), maintaining dykes, and building houses on stilts, we are talking about managed retreat due to lack of funds.  Ultimately it feels as though the government is paying headline lip service to climate change resilience; we aren’t getting serious about community and infrastructure resilience which is especially worrying given that the government is rowing-back on net zero as it tries to shore up energy security with fossil fuels. The upshot is that lenders can’t afford to stick their heads in the sand on this either.  They need to bake climate change risk into the way they do business.  They need to think big and use data upfront through APIs to triage risks at the point of offer (we can help) and also a further review based on the client’s individual situation with physical and transitional risk impacts going forward. They need to make sure that the conveyancers on their panels pass on any information which may affect their security.  They need to demand the use of climate risks search tools by property lawyers at the point of instruction.  They also need to demonstrate that they are looking after borrowers, too (TCF)  and ensure conveyancers are signposting climate risk to borrowers. Lenders, when it comes to managing exposure on asset investment risk — whether commercial or resi property — the ball is in your court.  You will need to seek clearer climate data through your panel due diligence channel now.  The US Army is not coming to the rescue of the UK’s lending industry. David Kempster is a director of Groundsure