Firms must adapt or die as freak weather dents profits

Pricing in climate change to business practice

From 12-foot snowdrifts in spring to wildfire three months later, extreme weather is becoming the new normal, writes Kames Capital's Georgina Laird.

With human-induced greenhouse gas emissions poised to cause even more disruption to global weather patterns, it is important to consider not only what effect it is having on the environment, but also on businesses.  Last year 15% of companies listed on the S&P 500 publicly disclosed that the weather affected their earnings - negatively in the vast majority of cases. On average, adverse weather knocked 6% off earnings for those firms that chose to quantify the effect. In fact, over the past ten years, the words "climate" and "weather" appeared in earnings call transcripts more often th...