Dr Stephane Hallegatte, author of the Nature Climate Change study, said: "There is a limit to what can be achieved with hard protection: populations and assets will remain vulnerable to defence failures or to exceptional events that exceed the protection design".
Increasing vulnerability exposes a large number of urban populations and assets to risks.
Urbanization and rapid population growth lead to the concentration of population and assets in hazard-prone urban areas.
The report suggests that by 2050 more than 1.6 billion people (or nearly 20% of the world's population) and assets worth $45 trillion could be at risk from the impact of increased flooding.
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Climate-related flood risks in these areas further threaten the population, economic assets, and food security.
Forrester's model is based on the following indicators: the world's population, fixed assets, the proportion of assets in agriculture, the level of pollution, the number of non-renewable natural resources.
It is usually very difficult to assess the effectiveness of the RCM at its inception, when data is inadequate or when it is implemented on a large population of assets, especially when most of them are small in size as in the distribution systems.
Today, fully one-quarter of the United States population is asset-poor.
So, for example, if we want seriously to tackle social injustice or to make an ageing population an asset, not a burden, it will require a strong and consistent framework of policies, substantive shifts in social norms and expectations, and new ways for individuals to pursue their interests.
