There are 7.6 billion people in the world today. The majority of the world population is affected by climate change in one way or the other.
If you scale the global situation to Sweden, with a population of 9.9 million, and imagine that Sweden represents the world, that would mean that:
- 4,561 people would die every year due to unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene. Roughly everyone in a city the size of Övertorneå in northern Sweden.
- 16,418 people would die every year due to environmental disasters. Roughly everyone in a city the size of Älmhult. Another 535,544 people would be affected by these disasters every year, the same as the population as the city of Göteborg.
- 145,939 people would be affected by floods every year. The city of Örebro would be under water once every year.
- 1,303,026 people would be at risk of floods. That is the same number of people residing in Lund, Umeå, Jönköping, Norrköping, Helsingborg, Örebro, Västerås, Linköping and Uppsala.
- 2,606,053 people would lack access to safe drinking water. No one in Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Uppsala, Linköping, Västerås, Örebro and Helsingborg would escape drinking contaminated water.
- Finally, 5,212,105 people would lack access to safe sanitation. That would be more than half of Sweden’s population.
By 2050, 38% of the world population would be in severe water stress and 2% of the world population would be displaced due to desertification, sea level rise and extreme weather events.
Scaling this to Sweden, that would be equivalent to 206,000 people being forced to move out of their homes every year and 4 million people without access to clean water.
If we would not accept this situation in our own country, why would we accept this on a global scale?
The most efficient way to solve the crisis is to invest in environmentally and socially responsible investments. Yet, only 0.4% of the capital in the fund industry is invested in such investment strategies.
This content is sponsored by Nordea.