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Chemical Technology • May 2015
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The profitable business of
climate change adaptation
H
otter summers, colder winters, drier, wetter, more
storms, more hurricanes. Given how much people
love dystopic movies, I continue to be surprised
at the ongoing opposition to accepting the science.
Whether we choose to deal with it or not, it is coming. And
not everyone is sitting around waiting for it to happen.
As an impoverished student in the mid-1990s, I spent an
entirely dull few weeks carefully slicing the radicle (tiny initial
root) fromdried peas. The University of Cape TownMicrobiol-
ogy Department was researching drought-resistant crops and
was looking to extract the genes which make this possible in
peas and transfer them to other food staples.
Climate change wasn’t front-of-mind back then, but
drought has always been with us. The looming climate crisis
has simply made those weather cycles more extreme. Even
as some areas have to cope with less water than ever, others
are coping with regular flooding, cyclones, or searing sum-
mers and frigid winters.
In November 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck New York
City. Over $19 billion of property and commercial damage
resulted, 250 000 vehicles were destroyed, and 53 people
killed. Events like this will happen more often and will cause
more damage.
Whether people, or the governments who represent them,
are prepared to accept the reality of climate change is im-
material. Businesses selling things, or protecting their existing
markets, have to accept the impact on their companies. Insur-
ers, dealing as they do with the future, have been amongst
the earliest of adopters of climate change adaptationmodels,
but companies across theworld are developing newproducts,
or adapting old ones, to counter the climate threat.
Take the simple problem of water-use. A WWF/SABMiller
report declares that anywhere between 60 to 180 litres
of water are used throughout the process of turning seed
into one litre of beer. The average brewery uses five to six
litres of water to produce a litre of beer. A world with less
water will have to put the price up and, for many of us that
implies that basic goods become unaffordable. Or, at worst,
entirely unavailable.
SABMiller aims to reduce water consumption from 4,2
litres to 3,5 litres this year. But that is still small beer in com-
parison to the amount of water lost at the agricultural level.
And farmers are having to figure out how to domore with less.
MillerCoors, a US subsidiary of SABMiller, has partnered
with The Nature Conservancy on a demonstrator project in
Idaho. Working closely with barley farmers, they have planted
shade trees along rivers that irrigate the farms, to reduce
temperatures and prevent evaporation. Vegetation has been
“In marketing terms the end of the world
will be very big,” says Ben Elton in his
novel, ‘This Other Eden’. “Anyone trying
to save it should remember that.” And –
meeting all our end-of-world fantasies –
is climate change.
by Gavin Chait