AlphaGeo

Michael Ferrari is Chief Scientific and Investment Officer at AlphaGeo. We focused on how resilience varies across geographies and what this means for long term regional investability. Accompanying this discussion is their web app. This is confronting. If you change the time slider to "End of Century", most of the world is red, indicating significant physical climate risk. Particularly alarming is when you change the toggle to "Resilience Adjusted Risk". This intensifies the red color in some parts of the world - Sub Saharan Africa, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Papua New Guinea and along the coast from French Guiana to Venezuela. This indicates that these countries have low resilience and limited capacity to combat the effects of climate change. There are implications here for population migrations, as illustrated by AlphaGeo here with regard to Africa. The conversation then turned to another app, produced in collaboration with Washington Post. Here one can input your location in the US and you will be given useful information from the perspective of a property investor on long term risk and resilience. Parag Khanna is the CEO. He has given several interesting TED talks such as how megacities are changing the map of the world. Perhaps the most fascinating idea of all though from Parag is Periodic Table of States, details here. For this analysis it all comes down to stability and they rank Eritrea as worst with a score of 2.36. They rank Switzerland best at 21.77. Overall, a fascinating crash course from Michael on the kind of spatial finance I like - using geography to inform investment decisions. It was a case of meeting my idols. I am glad we were able to hit it off and am keen to see what develops.