The UK government is putting £10m behind a new research centre into green finance.
The move comes as Glasgow gears up to host a major UN climate summit, the Bank of England brings in climate “stress tests” later this year, and investors continue to make calls for quality data on climate financial risk.
The UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment will see the government team up with the University of Oxford and other institutions, the Financial Times reports.
The output will be publicly available, with granular detail that will allow both institutions and regular investors to spot the riskiest areas in company holdings and supply chains.
Centre director and Oxford university professor Ben Caldecott tells the paper: “The gap between where we need to be on environmental and climate data analytics, and where we are at present, is very large indeed.”
The government agrees that “access to scientifically robust data and analytics is currently patchy and unreliable.”
A host of other academics from the likes of Imperial College and The Alan Turing Institute will also be involved in the project, which will attempt to get a better grip on reporting the impact of both quantifiable physical phenomena like adverse weather conditions, as well ‘transition risks’ like legal action that can be tougher to pin down, with the priority being the risk entailed by where exactly an asset is located.
Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center at the Atlantic Council director Kathy Baughman McLeod tells the Financial Times: “We should soon expect an even greater demand for democratised risk modelling and measurement…Practical need, especially for countries that can’t afford proprietary models, calls for more open-source tools.”
