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When the doors opened on Wednesday morning at Tokyo’s 10th annual Heat Solution expo, the temperature outside was nudging 35C and heatstroke warnings were in place for much of Japan. Weather apps, compounding the sense of nature in extremis, cautioned that a tornado would shortly hit the capital.
The deadliness of disarray is everywhere, and so, the expo powerfully suggests, is the threat of ever greater economic division around the cost of keeping cool. The heavily attended trade show opened to a worldwide background of floods, fires and drought three days after what scientists suspect may have been, on a global average basis, the hottest day ever recorded. Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, predicted more broken records as we perspire into what he called “truly uncharted territory”.
An ideal time, if you can see past the present and pending misery inherent in all this, for employers to consider the Iceman Pro-X self-cooling work vest, bottom-chilling office chairs, hydrating ice slurry, interior mist-emitters and a vast array of other products designed to keep a labour force working through ever more adverse conditions. If, of course, they or we can afford it.
For all the innovation and salesmanship on display, the vibe at Heat Solution is profoundly unsettling. There is the strong sense, among the aisles of companies plying their anti-heat wares, of a wider declaration of defeat. Corporations, governments and supranational organisations may talk about climate change mitigation, net zero emissions and other macro attempts to hold back catastrophe; but on the ground, runs the message being pushed to factory owners, food producers, construction companies and other businesses, the medicine you need right now is palliative, not preventive.
This message was hardened by an even larger, related trade show being held in the same convention centre on the broader theme of “resilience”. A central focus here is on preparedness for all manner of extremity as infrastructure endures ever fiercer natural bludgeonings.
This palliative vs preventive distinction is also now becoming sharper for investors as they weigh the relative attractiveness of giving their portfolios exposure to climate change mitigation (reducing the pace of global warming) or to climate change adaptation (adjusting to the reality of current and future effects).
In a note to investors published earlier this week, Citi Research set out the opportunities of the latter as the frequency and intensity of climate catastrophes spread the cost of adaptation across many stakeholders. In a November 2023 report, the UN Environment Programme estimated the global adaptation funding gap at between $194-366bn per year. The complexity behind that figure, said Citi’s analysts, lies in working out who will actually bear this cost. That then opens up discussions, they added, on “potential policy support, taxation, de-risking via blended finance and even the concept of innovative new financial instruments”.
Many of the visitors to the Heat Solution expo, meanwhile, already had a fair idea of where the cost burden will end up in the short term. Among the crowd of small and medium-sized business owners around the booth of self-cooling workwear being offered by Yamashin Seikyo was a factory owner from Nagoya. The Yamashin rep’s pitch was that ever more dangerous summer heat will force companies to change the way they cool factory staff — from expensive and not necessarily effective air conditioning to individual, clothing-based solutions.
The factory owner, though quite able to see through a peddler’s patter, also acknowledged that rising temperatures would freight his duty of care as an employer with far more cost than it used to. The mathematics of providing each of his workers with $800 worth of cooling equipment were not attractive, but if he failed to do so “my staff will just go and work somewhere that keeps them cool”.
Lodged somewhere in his conclusion is the potential framework of a heat equivalent of the digital divide. There will be businesses that can afford to mitigate, and others that cannot. But it is also easy to imagine, even in historically deflationary Japan, a strong imperative for businesses to pass the additional costs on to customers. Heatflation, as a way of describing the upward pressure on costs caused by climate change, has so far tended to be most focused on the price impact on food and water. The attendees at Heat Solution 2024 suggest that the term will quite soon apply to pretty much everything.
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