Instead, market participants assume climate effects will prevail over long-term horizons, more than 20 to 30 years into the future. Thus, there is a mismatch between investment horizons and the expected arrival of climate change-driven financial effects.
This said, it is increasingly difficult to disassociate credit risk from climate risk. Climate effects bankers must consider manifest not just as gradual changes in temperature or sea levels, but also as increased frequency and intensity of acute weather events. The past few years have produced several record-breaking loss events, with the mounting costs ofbillion-dollar disasters ranging from hurricanes and typhoons to flooding and fires. The Pacific Gas and Electric bankruptcy following a 2018 California wildfire season that set records for destructiveness may be a precursor of what is to come, with obvious implications for sectors such as transportation, agriculture, and energy. The result is driving bankers (and insurance companies) to be ever-more cognizant of needing to quantify these risks and their impacts across banks’ portfolios. From real estate exposures to loan books, virtually no asset class is immune to increased risks.
A less obvious and certainly less discussed — but possibly the most important — financial factor that should drive credit portfolio managers to consider climate change impacts on their portfolios is the association between a firm’s enterprise value, credit quality, and long-run cash flow generation. As a rule, more than half a firm’s value can be attributed to cash flows beyond 20 or 30 years. In our view, a firm’s viability and creditworthiness can vary materially across climate scenarios that may unfold over a relatively short horizon of three to five years and become increasingly compromised during that shorter time horizon.
Climate change effects on corporations can take many forms. Understanding these pathways is a critical step to the evaluation and management of risks. First, climate change can affect a firm’s value directly and across the value chain through both acute and chronic pathways. Extreme weather can disrupt supply chains, render facilities inoperable, and compromise consumers’ ability to purchase goods and services that are the outputs of corporate activities. Climate change can also indirectly influence corporate viability by negatively influencing the broader environment within which corporations operate — resulting, for example, in large-scale population migration, ecosystem collapse, and loss of social license to operate. Both direct and indirect effects can affect corporate performance and, therefore, require quantitative rigor and diligence to model. Companies can also take direct action to bolster their response to climate change and, in doing so, improve their long-term viability. Through assiduous investment in facility hardening and employee protection, companies can create outcomes that benefit shareholders as well as the communities they serve.
Misalignment of the investment holding period and the time frame in which climate change’s effects will have impact stems from misguided assumptions. We already see the economic effects of extreme weather today, and the sooner we can effectively model and quantify pathways between climate events and credit, the better we will be able to invest in outcomes that prevent outsized market corrections in the future.
