The organization

Sust Global enables one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure to integrate AI-powered climate data seamlessly into their platform, facilitating investment, trading, and risk decision making.

The Challenge

Our customer’s mission is to deliver the cleanest, richest and most accessible data, with a strategic focus on facilitating the shift to sustainable finance, making the provision of best-in class physical climate risk data a key priority. 

Their own clients include asset managers across the mining and energy sectors, where exposure to physical climate risk is extensive due to their large number operational assets. They are also increasingly required to provide TCFD-compliant reporting on climate risks in several jurisdictions, requiring physical climate risk data at asset level to satisfy their disclosure obligations.

Previous solutions offered low spatial resolution and did not provide asset-level data. They also surfaced insights via a separate standalone proprietary dashboard, limiting the potential for the seamless platform integration needed.

Sust Global’s solution

Sust Global’s global, granular data, with its flexible API-first integration into their existing workflows, was the obvious choice in terms of its accessibility and precision. Our product also provides data on multiple climate perils including water stress, which is of particular interest to the clients of this particular data platform.

Scalable across multiple portfolios and companies, we are an ideal fit to enable asset managers to get started on material physical climate risk reporting while adhering to the recommendations of the TCFD and other relevant disclosure frameworks. 

Our solution also offers future commercial possibilities. This includes sell-side thought leadership on the theme of risk management to engage investors in the alpha opportunity, as well as new products and services connected to climate-related risks and sustainability. Furthermore, investor expectations regarding ESG performance are rising and commodity funds lend themselves well to climate risk optimization with the right data. Future opportunities may include the weighting of equities according to climate risk, and also products positioned around sector neutrality.

Contact us via the form below to learn more about how Sust Global can provide your organization with access to reliable high frequency data insights that support climate-informed investment decisions via our flexible API integration.

The organization

Sust Global’s AI-powered analytics and APIs are serving one of the leading fixed income analytics platforms. Our data and APIs enable institutional investors to integrate climate analytics across portfolios, benchmarks, trading decisions and risk, with a strong focus on mortgage backed securities (MBS). 

The Challenge

As physical assets and portfolios face mounting risks from the effects of climate change, financial data platforms require robust methodologies that can predict the probability and severity of events accurately throughout the life of mortgages. This must be done at both the granular property level and the aggregate portfolio level. Additionally, our customer required a scalable and dynamic solution that could be used to scope risk across thousands of underlying properties and their mortgages. The data needed to integrate seamlessly into traditional financial workflows.

Accessibility, precision, and methodological rigor were therefore key priorities when choosing a climate analytics provider, enabling their own clients to plan their portfolio distribution effectively, particularly in high-risk areas. 

Sust Global’s solution

Sust Global’s industry leading AI-powered climate data is able to provide transparency on climate risk across global portfolios, at the portfolio and individual mortgage level, starting with only identifiers (such as CUSIP or ISIN). Through frictionless integration with Sust Global’s API, real-time RMBS climate risk intelligence enables portfolio managers to conduct prospective analyses of investment opportunities, as well as completing thorough portfolio risk assessments. Climate risks are quantified in terms of probability and severity across six climate hazards: wildfire, floods, hurricanes, heatwaves, water stress and sea level rise. 

To ensure that this data is fully integrated with the existing investment workflow, these risks are converted into financial loss projections by combining our AI-enhanced climate simulations with hundreds of sector-specific damage functions used throughout the insurance sector. This provides annual financial loss projections, hazard by hazard, at the portfolio and tangible asset level.

As a result, analysts and portfolio managers are able to proceed with confidence and clarity in their decision making in a changing climate. In doing so they are improving their risk-adjusted returns and fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities. It also means that they are now better prepared for full compliance with any prospective climate reporting legislation likely to be introduced by the SEC. 

Contact us via the form below to learn more about how Sust Global can provide your organization with access to reliable high frequency data insights that support climate-informed investment decisions via our flexible API integration.

The organization 

Agendi is a boutique sustainability strategy consultancy working with Fortune 500 organizations across a variety of sectors. Their work focuses mainly on environmental sustainability, along with some social and governance projects. Their sustainability work includes environmental consulting on material issues such as quantifying climate impacts and greenhouse gas accounting; as well as strategy planning – setting science-based targets and feasibility assessments, and defining strategies to work towards meaningful reductions in climate impacts. Agendi also supports clients with reporting, e.g. TCFD-aligned climate-related information disclosures, plus work on ESG rating schemes. 

The challenge

Prior to working with Sust Global, Agendi completed high level qualitative studies using publicly available tools coupled with in-house modeling. They were keen to find a physical climate risk data provider using the latest climate and data science in order to remove uncertainty and provide rigorously validated projections efficiently. They also needed additional granularity in order to supply clients with site-specific data. Easily accessible and comprehensive datasets, incorporating multiple spatial resolutions, climate scenarios, and flexibility on time horizons, were also an important requirement due to the cross-functional nature of how the climate data is utilized by client companies to fulfill multiple climate objectives. For example:

Finance, facilities, business resiliency and legal teams are additional end users of this data.

Sust Global’s solution

Agendi has been able to provide enhanced physical climate risk reporting with the support of Sust Global’s data. The multi-hazard, multi-scenario dataset up to the year 2100 provides is expansive and easy to navigate, meaning it can be deployed to meet the varying requirements of clients across different teams and industries.

One example of how they supported a client project with Sust Global was by using our climate data to identify short- and long-term site risks across a portfolio. The client had a variety of owned assets in locations with long-term leases and little flexibility to relocate. Agendi were able to select all the locations and obtain insights on their respective risk exposure through our platform. They then ran an interactive business impact workshop with the client, running through the risk data, examining what resilience measures are in place, and comparing this with the vulnerabilities highlighted in the risk assessment. They were also able to look at impact bands further down the line and obtain granular reports and heatmaps which fed into existing risk management systems and risk team analyses, flagging sites at high exposure as well as any owned assets which had to be added to the risk register. 

The increasing demand for TCFD reporting among clients has led to a consolidation of ESG platforms and desire for a more streamlined approach, which is supported by Sust Global’s flexible data integrations. Heatmaps and data visualizations have also formed an important component of cross-functional use of climate risk analyses. 

In the future, deeper methodological insights around site exposure will add further value to client reports. Loss modeling assessments across multiple sectors and with more granular detail about thresholds of uncertainty will also strengthen their analyses.

If you would like to learn more about how Sust Global can help your organization assess physical climate risk, get in touch by completing the form below.

The organization

The European Sustainable Hospitality Club started as an online community of industry professionals, hotel GMs, procurement directors, investors, asset managers, and hotel owners. They saw a need to educate and support the industry transition and developed an internal platform to educate their community onsite and online. This has since developed into a hospitality impact investing initiative, supporting asset owners by providing structures and tools to enable frictionless implementation and integration of sustainability strategies into the business model.

The initiative connects the dots between tech platforms and organizations, linking hotels, asset owners and environmental consultancies together along with the data, software, and education required to facilitate sustainable strategy and create a more inclusive and resilient hospitality sector. This supports ESH in their drive to increase efforts towards sustainability more generally. We also know from our work more broadly that a robust sustainability strategy has the potential to reduce future operating risks and costs while driving consumer engagement among investors. 

The challenge

A major sustainability challenge for many of the businesses ESH works with is aligning strategic priorities with resource allocation. The impacts of climate change also present a number of structural challenges for partners looking to develop or refurbish large commercial properties. For example, the hospitality industry whose water usage is extremely high is particularly vulnerable to issues arising from water stress, creating both operational and supply chain risks. 

ESH were keen to identify to what extent precise climate risk data could inform them in their recommendations for hospitality asset owners seeking to implement sustainability strategies.

Sust Global’s solution

Sust Global’s geospatial intelligence helped ESH build a sustainability and risk mitigation report for a specific site they have been hired to advise on. Using our climate data, they provided a 360 degree overview of how physical climate risks, particularly sea level rise and water stress, could cause disruption to operations and what action could be taken to mitigate the worst impacts.

ESH created an action plan that included recommendations to change shower faucets to prevent leakage and the use of water reuse systems within properties. They also proposed the implementation of a farm-to-table food system whereby a single farm would produce most supplies, thus reducing water usage across their food production supply chain. 

ESH also envisages that Sust Global’s data will support the asset managers they advise by providing value at risk metrics across whole portfolios – demonstrating how capital is impacted.

Sust Global’s data will also inform the ESH investor community on hospitality assets’ value at risk due to climate change giving them unique intelligence to factor into their decision making.

If you would like to learn more about how Sust Global can help your organization assess physical climate risk, get in touch by completing the form below.

The organization

Blue Forest’s mission is to use innovative finance to achieve sustainable environmental solutions, with a goal of increasing climate and ecological resilience by communicating the environmental and economic value of healthy ecosystems. Their work focuses on identifying the multiple benefits provided by resilient ecosystems such as protected air and water quality, reduced flood and fire risk, and enhanced biodiversity. The financing model relies on quantifying the benefits of ecosystem restoration and habitat management with local beneficiaries to enable traditional and new long-term funding commitments for ecosystem restoration projects. Private investors then provide the upfront capital for projects, accelerating the pace and scale of implementing restoration activities.

The challenge

In order to quantify risks from acute hazards, such as wildfire, Blue Forest relies on earth observation, field data, and local expert knowledge. While satellite observations and historic weather records enable organizations to characterize risk trends, data uncertainty around climate change poses a significant challenge in understanding future hazard risk. Future hazards are unlikely to resemble the recent past, both in location and intensity, and understanding the range of possible futures improves our understanding of current risk to infrastructure, communities, companies, and the environment.  

Blue Forest is actively building approaches and tools for hazard mapping in new geographies. Much of their work has focused on forest management projects in California and the Pacific Northwest, where substantial local knowledge enables them to develop high-precision models of wildfire risk. To expand access to their suite of tools for conservation finance, Blue Forest seeks validated, high-resolution datasets on future hazard impacts and climate change vulnerability. New pilots are also exploring financing opportunities in coastal and marine ecosystems, which introduces a broader range of hazard risks and locations required for assessments. 

Sust Global’s solution

Sust Global evaluates future risk from water stress, drought, and wildfires. High-resolution data has helped Blue Forest to expand its geographical focus, by allowing for resilience modeling in areas that previously would have been too data intensive to undertake. By incorporating future risk into the economic value of ecosystem restoration projects, Sust Global can help Blue Forest more comprehensively assess ideal locations and projects for leveraging innovative finance.

In addition to providing event probabilities and other numerical estimates of hazard severity, the risk products from Sust Global employ a straightforward stoplight approach, indicating a high, medium, or low level of confidence. These outputs can assist Blue Forest in the communication of climate risk with stakeholders who don’t have a science background. It may also provide a valuable means to further project goals where existing data are limited. The spatiotemporal resolution and coverage of Sust Global’s data has also provided additional detail to project assessments: for example, water risk is available from the watershed level to regional and global coverage. 

If you would like to learn more about how Sust Global can help your organization assess physical climate risk, get in touch by completing the form below.

The organization

Focused on delivering its vision: The Sustainable Protection of Everyday Needs, Klöckner Pentaplast (kp) is a global leader in rigid and flexible packaging and specialty film solutions, serving the pharmaceutical, medical device, and protein markets, amongst others.

With a broad and innovative portfolio of packaging and product films and services, kp plays an integral role in the customer value chain by safeguarding product integrity, protecting brand reputation, and improving sustainability. 

kp’s “Investing in Better” sustainability strategy solidifies its commitment to achieving ten clear targets for long-term improvement by increasing recycling and recyclability of products, cutting carbon emissions and continuous improvement in employee engagement, safety, and diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Founded in 1965, kp has 31 plants in 18 countries and employs over 5,700 people committed to serving customers worldwide in over 60 locations.

Navigating the sustainability space as a plastics manufacturer is complex. In order to maintain relevance and adhere to regulatory requirements, kp needs to be aware of climate impacts and operate with a strategy that has sustainability at its core. 

The challenge

While operating in the highly scrutinized space of plastics, kp understands that to demonstrate leadership on sustainability, it is critical to engage across a range of material issues. Increasingly, the interconnectivity of sustainability topics is becoming clearer, and climate-related issues often act as a connection that ties many of these issues together. The ability to talk about climate issues in an informed way, with a quantitative viewpoint, is essential to ensure the appropriate decisions are made for the business.

For example, it is not yet widely understood that plastics often have a much lower carbon footprint than other common packaging materials seen on the market, and as climate impact is an important determinant of whether a material is future-proof, it is a critical input for the business, its customers and final consumers.

Climate disclosures not only demonstrate leadership, but are critical in the current regulatory environment. Despite not yet being mandatory in the EU where kp are headquartered, regulations will come into force in 2024. Therefore, as well as demonstrating a commitment to transparency which is essential in the space within which kp operates, they are also prepared for a future that involves mandatory TCFD-aligned reporting, by using the TCFD framework to inform the development of their global climate strategy and understand potential risks. 

As a privately owned company, kp is seeing an increase in reporting requirements on climate risk from capital markets and ESG ratings. While this is also the trend for listed companies, this appears to be increasingly the case with private versus public equities assets due to their longer ownership duration, beyond kp’s specific case.

Sust Global’s solution

Historically, quantifying climate risk has been a big challenge. The data has either been incomplete, inaccurate, difficult to understand, or all three. By providing a standardized and comprehensive view of hazards based on the latest climate models and machine learning techniques, Sust Global provides a new level of climate risk intelligence which enables greater precision and transparency in reporting. It has allowed kp to skip through the often cumbersome process of understanding and assessing data sources and working through the challenge of variable data quality across datasets. As a result, the kp team is able to focus quickly on the outcomes of the climate hazards and analyzing business risks and mitigation strategies.

This climate intelligence quantifies risk across six acute and chronic climate hazards1, across 3 key climate scenarios2, and multiple time periods. In this case, we ran an analysis with a focus on predicted risk over a period of 15 years to align with kp’s strategy framework. The assessment was conducted across all of kp’s operational sites globally, scattered across five continents and eighteen countries, as well as key supply chain locations across the world. 

Through the analysis and Sust’s technology, it was possible to turn this climate intelligence into localized business intelligence, thereby facilitating strategic conversations between the sustainability, finance and enterprise risk teams about impacts and mitigation strategies. For example, the kp team differentiated between acute and chronic risks and devised appropriate risk exposure calculations for each. In addition, the clear understanding of which site was exposed to which climate hazard made it clear what mitigating activities could be recommended, and at which general timeline. Investments such as heat proofing for factories, or mitigating activities for water stress, can be discussed tangibly and are currently under consideration, in addition to an understanding of the possible value-at-risk from acute hazards such as floods or cyclones. 

In the future, since Sust Global’s data is TCFD-aligned, it enables kp to prepare a compliant climate disclosure with ease.  From a strategic perspective, it could be used to support and inform decisions on an assortment of business activities where local climate concerns need to be assessed, such as for site-level risk assessments, or in assessing potential future site locations. Together with the risk function, these issues are now integrated into the broader enterprise risk management framework.  

kp recognizes that climate risks are systemic, and sees an opportunity in using Sust’s data to engage and collaborate with other businesses in regions where risks have been identified, to generate collective action towards solutions. Yui Kamikawa, VP Sustainability at kp says: “Sust Global has been at the forefront of improving the science behind climate risks and making data accessible. It delivered clear outcomes and has enabled us to proceed with confidence, allowing kp to have deeper strategic conversations internally on risk mitigation.”

Footnotes

  1. Floods, wildfire, tropical cyclones, water scarcity, heatwaves and sea level rise.
  2. Strong Mitigation (SSP1-RCP2.6), Middle of the Road (SSP2-RCP4.5) and High Emissions (SSP5-RCP8.5).

If you would like to learn more about how Sust Global can help your organization assess physical climate risk, get in touch by completing the form below.

The organization

Solid World is building an innovative funding framework that will enable the scaling of the voluntary carbon market, by providing liquidity for carbon reduction projects. There are inherent risks associated with high-potential carbon reduction projects: Their tokenized agreements ensure all forward deals are immediately liquid, ensuring buying and selling at market rates. 

The challenge

Unlocking funding for carbon reduction projects is the core problem Solid World is looking to solve. Trust is a key challenge, given the skepticism around the crypto space and the complexities of developing new carbon projects; the implementation of a world class de-risking process has been key for Solid World to be able to instill confidence in investors. Another challenge is that nature based carbon projects can be hard to value since climate change often causes impacts to project sites while development is underway. Accounting for such impacts is key for the projects to be accurately valued at the outset. 

Sust Global’s solution

Solid World’s prior climate risk due diligence relied purely on historic risk exposure. With the changing climate, they wanted to effectively incorporate both historic and forward looking risk exposure to climate hazards in their risk scenario assessments. Sust Global’s granular, real-time observation of climate impacts and forward looking climate scenario analytics, across multiple acute and chronic climate related perils, have enabled Solid World to create climate projections with an additional layer of clarity for project stakeholders, ensuring greater trust and transparency.  

Sust Global’s granular climate risk projections enable efficient accounting of climate risks to carbon projects which incorporate a precise view of the evolving climate change scenario. This is important for the valuation process and to ultimately ensure carbon project developers include an appropriate buffer for future climate risk.

Solid World sees the opportunity for Sust Global’s physical risk datasets to build upon the previous climate risk modeling method of linearizing historical data. Sust Global provides frequent scenario-driven modeling that takes into account current global state which helps Solid World account more precisely for climate risk to a new or on going carbon project, providing a buffer and accounting for harm done by climate change during the duration of a carbon project. This improves the way that future risk is incorporated into project assessments and supports the development of multiple types of nature-based carbon offset projects. 

If you would like to learn more about how Sust Global can help your organization assess physical climate risk, get in touch by completing the form below.

There is no longer any dispute that the unfolding climate emergency poses a significant risk to every type of global asset. In the last year alone volatility on physical impacts from climate risk has increased globally, with the Australian government reporting that severe flooding has cost $3.3 billion in damages so far in 2022; while the White House, USA, has estimated that it will cost the federal budget almost $2 trillion annually to combat physical climate risk towards the end of the century. No wonder business leaders and investors are demanding better climate risk analysis.

Within the real estate industry, conducting forward looking portfolio analyses in order to assess potential climate risk for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) has become a top priority. The key areas analyses need to address include:

–  Risk exposure today and how it will change in the future

–  Risk management around key areas of exposure

–  Portfolio trends

–  Screening investments during due diligence processes

The seriousness of the efforts within real estate to manage climate risk is reflected in the fact that the world’s largest REITs represent 8% of supporters adhering to the TCFD (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures) framework. While some institutions use the GRESB real estate assessment framework to manage their climate-related risks and opportunities, TCFD has broader buy-in from regulators, policymakers, governments, asset owners and investors. It is widely considered the most effective framework to enable stakeholder assessment of businesses’ readiness for climate change and is quickly becoming best practice globally, with countries such as New Zealand, Switzerland, UK and China having announced mandated TCFD reporting, with the US and Canada expected to follow suit.

For REITs to effectively identify, assess and manage climate change without TCFD becoming another tick box exercise, firms first need to conduct best in class physical risk analysis. At Sust Global we provide the tools to enable this – by supplying dependable, satellite validated, climate science data in an easy-to-use platform called Climate Explorer.

Built on top of the latest CMIP6 climate models, created by top scientists, climatologists and economists, by simply uploading your geolocation assets into Climate Explorer our clients are able to quickly identify key areas within the portfolio that are at risk to climate hazards, such as wildfire, heatwaves, sea level rise, floods, cyclones and water stress up to 2100, and under different climate scenarios.

Due to the change in emission levels, it’s imperative to conduct analyses under different climate scenarios to understand what the hazard impact could look like in a 1.5 degree rise average in temperature, to a 4.5 average degree rise. Our clients are effectively managing their climate risks and operations using insights provided by the Sust platform. 

Our REIT customers are therefore able to use the TCFD framework to conduct best practice reporting, in turn strengthening their awareness, readiness and actions towards climate change within their portfolio or due diligence processes, thus satisfying the needs of investors.

If you’d like to learn more on how Sust Global can best support your climate risk analysis, find more information on our website, or get in touch at [email protected].

A leading US bank with large agency and non-agency residential mortgage backed securities (RBMS) portfolios noticed that defaults by mortgagors within RMBS were rising due to their properties being impacted by climate events, such as wildfire, floods and cyclones. More alarming than the absolute level was the trend, which was rising rapidly. The portfolio managers were aware that this was becoming an increasing performance and fiduciary risk.

Their principal challenge was that they had no robust method to identify the probability and severity of these events over the lifetime of the mortgages across the whole of the United States – at a granular property level, and across multiple climate hazards. They also needed a solution that was scalable and dynamic across thousands of underlying properties and their mortgages, which integrated directly with their workflow.

Sust Global’s climate data analytics were able to provide transparency on climate risk across the portfolio, at the RMBS and individual mortgage level, starting with only the RMBS identifiers (such as CUSIP or ISIN). The location and value of each mortgage was extracted from the identifier via a platform integrated with Sust’s API, which returned real-time RMBS climate risk intelligence, enabling portfolio managers to conduct prospective analyses of investment opportunities as well as for portfolio risk assessments. Climate risks were quantified in terms of probability and severity across six climate hazards: wildfire, floods, hurricanes, heatwaves, water stress and sea level rise. 

To ensure that this data could be fully integrated with the existing investment process, these risks were then converted into financial loss projections, using algorithms developed using massive datasets of historic climate events and the resulting financial losses. These algorithms provide annual financial loss projections, hazard by hazard, over the life of each RMBS and the underlying mortgages.

As a result the Head of MBS Portfolios, and the portfolio managers are able to proceed with confidence and clarity in their decision making with respect to increasing climate risks – across both. In doing so they are improving their risk-adjusted returns and fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities. It also means that they are now fully compliant, if and when climate reporting legislation is introduced by the SEC.

Want to learn more about Sust Global’s climate data analytics? Fill in the form below!