SAVE the planet, save your pension. A new report claims that environmental problems could bust pension funds by 2050.
Aled Jones of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues drew together evidence about a wide range of environmental problems, from water shortages to atmospheric pollution to climate change. They plugged these into models used to predict the values of pension funds.
Jones ran several scenarios, varying how quickly governments and industry responded to environmental problems. The results are published by the UK's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFA). In almost all cases the value of funds began to fall before 2100. In the worst-case scenario, where governments and markets did nothing, values dropped steeply from around 2020 and fell to zero by 2050.
"Despite strong evidence that there is a risk that resource constraints could have significant economic impacts, these risks are not being factored in by many actors in the global economy," says Peter Tompkins of the IFA.
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Environmental crises may threaten pensions
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Environmental crises may threaten pensions
