Climate-driven extreme weather events and the transition to a low-carbon economy are expected to have material impacts on companies, with increasing significance for credit analysis. However, both physical and transition risks have a wide range of potential outcomes. In its new report, Climate scenarios vital to assess credit impact of carbon transition, physical risks, Moody’s Investors Service describes a conceptual approach to scenario analysis, leveraging Four Twenty Seven’s methodology for physical risks.
The transition risk approach is to explore sector-specific credit implications for two IEA emissions scenarios. For physical risk scenarios Moody’s will use data from Four Twenty Seven to provide a uniform starting point from which to explore the range of credit implications of different climate hazards across sectors. Since the climate takes years to fully respond to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in the near-term the uncertainty in physical outcomes is not driven by policy changes, but rather by scientific uncertainty within the climate models. By grouping the outcomes of climate models within a single RCP into low, medium and high tiers one can explore the range of potential severity in climate hazards such as extreme temperature and precipitation.