In brief
- Climate analytics initially focused on carbon emissions metrics1 such as carbon footprint and carbon intensity. While carbon emissions metrics can help understand where a company currently stands on its emissions profile, these backward-looking metrics that are often lagged by one to two years provide only limited insights into a company’s exposures to climate risks. To understand a company’s exposures to climate risks, climate scenario analysis can provide further insights.
- Given the multitude of climate scenarios that are available, it is crucial that investors understand how scenarios are constructed, the uncertainties that are inherent in climate model design, and the associated implications for the results of a climate scenario analysis.
What are Climate scenarios?
Climate scenario analysis is a process to help organizations consider how the future might look if certain trends continue or certain conditions are met with respect to the climate.2 Climate scenarios analysis is generally done by running simulations of plausible climate futures, based on a set of assumptions on the economy and its interaction with the climate. These simulations produce climate and economic outputs such as global GHG emissions, GDP and energy demand given specific assumptions.