Dave Sivaprasad

You have sea walls, storm barriers.

We can restore mangroves, and this can protect the coast.

The challenge is not so much the solutions.

The challenge is actually what's the right mix of solutions that fits the local context and delivers the highest socio-economic return.

Now, let me illustrate this with an example.

I worked with a government in Southeast Asia, a country with a large population, diverse set of islands, many coastal communities spread across.

And one region in particular faced a complex interplay of challenges, rising sea levels that were causing permanent flooding,

increasing storms that were damaging the coast, a large proportion of vulnerable people in poverty living in low-lying areas.

On top of that, land subsidence that made matters worse.

So we worked with the government to model the impact of climate change over the coming decades to answer questions like which parts of the coast will be flooded, which populations will be impacted.

Where would schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure be damaged?

How would this impact crops, water systems?

What would be the impact of natural ecosystems that are important to this country?

And importantly, what this did was that it combined climate science with data analytics, with local context, and linked it to socioeconomic impact.

Now, to give an example, one particular community faced the risk of 100,000 people potentially being displaced because of increasing sea levels.

Eight percent of the economy and almost half of the region's wetland reserves were at risk of being damaged.

Now, in addition, with this insight, the government was able to better understand the knock-on effects that this would have on public health, on food security, on forced migration.

So a lot of issues.

So what do you do about that?

I mean, there's massive exposure and no clear answers to what you do.