How will climate change affect finance?
Climate hazards can impact households' ability to manage losses, expenses, and transactions using financial products and services such as credit, insurance, and payments. Many households are unprepared for unexpected expenses and disruptions to income due to climate events and conditions.
While some in the financial community are uncertain about the possibility of a climate-driven liquidity crisis, our research shows that climate-related factors could rapidly increase the risk of financial contagion and potentially a system-wide disaster.
Climate-related financial risks The potential risks that may arise from climate change or from efforts to mitigate climate change, their related impacts and their economic and financial consequences.
U.S. Department of the Treasury
In its October 2021 Report on Climate Related Financial Risk, the FSOC identified climate change as an emerging threat to financial stability and issued over 30 related recommendations to financial regulators.
Climate change presents a range of risks and impacts that are expected to negatively impact our economy. These include property loss and damage, infrastructure and service costs and risks to financial stability.
Prior studies have showed that several “early warning signals”—particularly rapid growth in aggregate credit—help predict the arrival of financial crises.
Climate-related financial risks have the potential to affect the safety and soundness of banks through physical and transition risks, which affect various sectors of the economy and may affect access to financial services and fair treatment of customers.
There is also growing global recognition that such disasters could pose risks to financial system stability, for example through loan losses and repricing of financial instruments, that would seriously affect the solvency and profitability of financial institutions.
For example, the costs of meeting new requirements on emission levels may be sufficient to put some companies out of business. Banks may also find themselves directly affected if they find that the value of property that they have taken as collateral is impaired by contamination.
Climate risks can manifest as financial risks in different ways. Consider these two hypothetical risk examples from agriculture finance: Example 1: A farm you finance does not adjust its crop rotation to adapt to lower annual precipitation and experiences low crop yields more frequently as a result.
How bad will climate crisis be in 2050?
New World Economic Forum analysis warns that climate-intensified natural disasters may lead to $12.5 trillion in economic losses and over two billion healthy life years lost by 2050.
The global cost of climate change damage is estimated to be between $1.7 trillion and $3.1 trillion per year by 2050. This includes the cost of damage to infrastructure, property, agriculture, and human health. This cost is expected to increase over time as the impacts of climate change become more severe.
In total, extreme weather events cost the US $150 billion per year, due to direct impacts such as infrastructure damage, worker injuries and agricultural losses, the authors of the report estimate.
Direct impacts affect your business directly, such as physical damage from floods or bushfires, or forced closures. Indirect impacts are the flow-on effects of climate change or extreme events, such as a supply chain being disrupted by extreme weather, or income being reduced.
The soft-landing dream is over; instead, the US economy is headed for a recession in the middle of 2024, Citi says. "There's this very powerful and seductive narrative around a soft landing, and we're just not seeing it in the data," Citi's chief US economist, Andrew Hollenhorst, said in a CNBC interview.
In the aggregate, for the U.S. the Sahm rule has not forecast a recession, but looking at state-level unemployment data, several states have seen relatively stark rises in unemployment from January 2023 to January 2024.
After global growth exceeded expectations in 2023, businesses' perceived probability of a global recession has fallen substantially in 2024, according to Oxford Economics data. Oxford's global risk survey in January showed a recession probability of 7.2% — less than half of what it was in October 2023.
Climate change is changing water availability, making it scarcer in more regions. Global warming exacerbates water shortages in already water-stressed regions and is leading to an increased risk of agricultural droughts affecting crops, and ecological droughts increasing the vulnerability of ecosystems.
For example, people living on floodplains, coastlines, or in areas prone to severe storms are more vulnerable to extreme weather. Those living in poverty may be less able to prepare for or respond to extreme events. As a result, these individuals are expected to have greater impacts from climate-related hazards.
Despite the imperative to prepare for a low-carbon economy, banks and other financial institutions have continued to lend to, invest in, and underwrite the industries fueling climate change.
What is Green Swan risk?
These include what we call "green swan" risks: potentially extremely financially disruptive events that could be behind the next systemic financial crisis.
Yet the effects of more frequent and extreme weather are just as consequential for the health of financial systems. The physical impacts of climate-related shocks, such as hurricane damage to power grids, affect financial institutions and how they make decisions. So do the risks of transition to a low-carbon economy.
Different index providers have discussed factors related to ESG policies. ESG index providers are given in Table 1. A sustainable environment, energy efficiency, carbon emissions, pollution, and the use of natural resources are considered environmental factors.
Climate change is directly contributing to humanitarian emergencies from heatwaves, wildfires, floods, tropical storms and hurricanes and they are increasing in scale, frequency and intensity. Research shows that 3.6 billion people already live in areas highly susceptible to climate change.
The global average temperature rise is predicted to climb permanently above 1.5°C by between 2026 and 2042, with a central estimate of 2032, while business as usual will see the 2°C breached by 2050 or very soon after [6].
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