Workshop on Assessing the Climate Resilience of Finance - From physical risk to resilience alignment

Physical climate impacts are increasingly felt across societies and economic activities. This keynote will explain how such impacts will increase over the short and long term, and how tipping points and shifting distributions of the size and frequency of climate-related hazards may accelerate impacts. The keynote will further highlight the need for the financial sector to understand differences in exposure and vulnerability to economic activities, both to assess systemic risks from climate change, as well as to understand opportunities to make finance consistent with climate-resilient development.

Speakers:

• Sabine Mauderer, Chair of the NGFS and Member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank
• Jo Tyndall, Director of the OECD Environment Directorate

Identifying physical climate risks to finance and investments is the first required step to manage climate-related financial risks and increase resilience. The session will discuss the range of existing methodologies, metrics and data to identify physical climate risks in finance. To do so, this session will cover the different steps of a climate risk assessment, from identifying climate hazard domains, to measuring exposure and vulnerability of real-economy assets and entities, to assessing financial risks from climate change at the level of financial assets, portfolios, institutions, and centres. The session will discuss strengths and limitations of existing and possible indicators, as well as consider potential ways forward for improved indicators to track and assess physical climate risks to investments and finance.

Moderator: Li Ming Ong, Director Data Management and Statistics Department at the Bank Negara Malaysia & Co-lead of the NGFS Expert Network on Data

Speakers:

• Irene Heemskerk, Head of the Climate Change Centre at the European Central Bank (presentation)
• Boris Prahl, Executive Director of the Climate Risk Center/ESG Research at MSCI
• Gladys Santis, Adaptation Officer at the Chilean Ministry of Environment
• Catherine Ansell, Executive Director, Climate Risk at JPMorgan
• Sean Carmody, Executive Director of the Insurance Division at the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority

The Paris Agreement sets out clear temperature and emission goals for climate change mitigation, which has given rise to many net-zero targets, transition plans and alignment assessments in the private and financial sector, using global and sector-specific climate mitigation scenarios as reference points. For climate change adaptation, there is no globally agreed-upon goal, while policies and targets at sectoral, national and subnational levels remain relatively partial and scattered. Against this backdrop, this session will discuss types and examples of climate change adaptation and resilience policy goals, targets and reference points relevant for resilience-related assessments in finance.

Moderator: Catherine Gamper, Climate Adaptation and Resilience Team Lead at the OECD Environment Directorate

Speakers:

• Nicola Ranger, Director, Resilient Planet Finance Lab and Group Leader, Resilience and Development, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford (presentation)
• Ammara Shariq, Climate Change Specialist, World Bank
• Michai Robertson, Senior Advisor for Finance to the Alliance of Small Islands States & Research Fellow at ODI
• Anna Dimitrijevics, Deputy Head of Unit for Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change in DG CLIMA at the European Commission
• Padraig Oliver, Programme Officer of the Climate Finance Unit at UNFCCC

Companies, investors, and financial institutions can take a range of actions to reduce physical climate risks and increase resilience in their activities and portfolios. This session will discuss typologies and examples of such actions, as well as indicators and data currently being collected on adaptation by these different actors. Based on this, the session will further highlight how information about these actions and indicators can contribute to informing assessments in finance of both financial risks and alignment with climate-resilient development.

Moderator: Jolien Noels, Economist/Policy Analyst at the OECD Environment Directorate

Speakers:

• Joss Matthewman, Senior Director of Climate Change Product Management & Strategy, Moody’s
• Clare Everett, Senior Global Policy Manager at CDP (presentation)
• Amine Benayad, Global Lead for Climate & Sustainability in Financial Institutions, BCG
• Mahesh Roy, Investor Strategies Programme Director at IIGCC

Speakers:

• Yann Marin, Incoming Head of Secretariat of the NGFS
• Mathilde Mesnard, Deputy Director of the OECD Environment Directorate