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For resource-intensive economies, physical and transition risks could drive a ‘climate change risk trap’
On a global level, and in guidance for financial sector regulators, climate change actions are often presented as a sliding scale between climate mitigation – efforts to reduce emissions – and climate adaptation – efforts to make countries more resilient to the impacts of climate change. The dichotomy arises within the financial sector through a similar sliding scale between different scenarios.
Many OIC countries face a different outlook, however, where higher transition and physical risks coexist, especially at the sub-national level. A new paper terms this outcome a ‘climate change risk trap’, and evaluates it by considering the impacts of climate change physical and transition risks on Kuwait following the release of the country’s first flash flood hazard map.
Governments, regulators and financial institutions will all have to chart their own path to respond to the elevated risks of climate change where this 'risk trap' is most likely to be present. The impact on a response to climate change goes beyond mitigation and increases the benefits of domestic financial sector development and efforts to produce a Just Transition.
Will climate financial stability risk assessment produce headwinds for climate finance in emerging markets?
The Financial Stability Board is developing an assessment framework to evaluate the risks to financial stability relating to climate change. In broad terms, it will translate a conceptual framework for how climate risks generate financial risks, and how these could cascade into a systemic risk.
Many of the risk metrics are being developed with reference to developed economies and specifically reference the way that “global financial stability risks may arise from climate shocks in EMDEs [including those that] originate in the real economy and transmit internationally [such as] in some EMDEs that provide agricultural and mining products to the rest of the world”.
There is a clear connection between economic shocks in large EMDEs and global financial institutions and markets. Climate-related risks are among the types of risks that can spill over widely into global markets. However, often the application of macroeconomic metrics to identify sources of risks to global financial stability can have the impact – even if unintended – of raising barriers to flows of climate finance to EMDEs.
Investing in responsible finance will pay dividends
Looking ahead in 2025, the growing acknowledgement of sustainability as a key issue, both globally and within OIC markets, has pivoted from expanding to new areas of sustainability towards working out ways to implement what is already on the table. Institutions that take the challenge seriously now stand to come out ahead as the impacts of climate change and the climate transition grow.
Regardless of the speed of implementation, the upcoming adoption of IFRS sustainability reporting standards will force financial institutions to prepare to incorporate the resulting disclosures into their decision-making processes. The standard-setting landscape for sustainability has experienced some consolidation with the formation of the International Standards Setting Board (ISSB) and the launch of the IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards.
With a shift deeper into the implementation of sustainability in core financing operations, as well as various policy and physical risk shocks, the points of differentiation between different institutions are likely to become much clearer. Being caught off-guard by policy developments needed to achieve national carbon targets, or not anticipating physical climate risks, or ignoring stakeholder involvement in transition plan implementation, will have tangible impacts on the bottom line and on financial institutions’ relationships with their stakeholders.
The full story of climate data for financial institutions isn’t just the numbers
The Network for Greening the Financial System has released a detailed overview of the state of emissions data and ways to improve them. It is much more important than it may appear at first glance. That’s because measurement and reporting are designed to guide how the data are being used, but no single metric or methodology provides a complete guide to Net Zero or Paris-alignment.
The purpose of climate disclosures is to help users of its reporting to evaluate the degree to which the entity is protecting itself against future risks associated with its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from climate change, nature loss, and the achievement or failure to see through a Just Transition. The numbers only tell one part of that story, even if they are perfectly consistent in what is being reported between different entities.
The much more important information comes through identifying how much an entity can and expects to be involved in influencing changes to the emissions it reports today for future periods. If they can clearly break down the emissions they report into buckets of emissions based on what they can and cannot influence, and then explain how they plan to influence others to reduce in line with their targets, then the report data become much more powerful.
Instead of being just another metric to report, it becomes enriched with both information about the present and guidance about the future, which brings both value creation potential and accountability.
A step-change: how a systemic risk buffer could benefit transition finance
The financial consequences of climate change and the necessary transition to global Net Zero by 2050 have made it difficult for financial institutions to change the way they make decisions quickly enough. A working paper published by researchers at the European Central Bank provides evidence for how the financial sector could be insulated from any losses by creating a systemic risk for the entire sector.
Until now, most of the regulatory responses to the risks associated with climate change have been incentives for non-financial companies to make green investments, greater disclosure by corporations and financial institutions about their financed emissions, and climate stress-testing exercises by central banks and supervisors.
The Systemic Risk Buffer was developed to reflect the overall level of near-term transition risk exposure of the financial institution – within the coming three years — and not be linked to individual green or dirty assets. Instead of adjusting the risk weighting of individual exposures, as a green supporting factor or dirty penalizing factor would do, it groups financial institutions into buckets based on the potential transition risk relative to their risk-weighted assets.
Using the collected data for calibrating a systemic risk buffer provides a tangible use for the stress tests and a data-guided way to balance the risk of financing climate-exposed sectors with the short-term gain that banks have by continuing to provide financing. Transition risk buckets offers substantial leeway for banks to finance companies transitioning activities from unsustainable to sustainable activities without facing increases in their capital requirement.
Banks in the GCC region are tackling climate transition risk, but it remains a ‘work-in-progress’
Standard & Poor’s Ratings has this week addressed frequently asked questions about climate transition risk facing banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, describing banks’ efforts in measuring the risk to date as a ‘work-in-progress’. On financed emissions, like those covered by RFI Foundation’s financed emissions database, S&P highlighted that “banks' difficulties with measuring scope 3 emissions come up regularly in our discussions”. This is understandable because emissions measurement is an almost universal challenge for banks globally.
This context of data gaps was a motivating factor for the way RFI undertook its financed emissions work, which is catalogued in an open-access database with five years of data covering banks and financial markets in the six GCC countries and five other OIC markets. The financial sector plays a key role in financing the transition and will need substantial new capabilities beyond what they have now to understand the many types of climate transition risk they face from the activities they finance.