Suggestions
Richard Clarke
Pricing tomorrow's cost of carbon today
Richard H. Clarke is a specialist in acute physical risk and climate at Climate and ESG Solutions, Ortec Finance, based in London, UK.13 He is part of the Climate Scenarios & Sustainability team at Ortec Finance, which focuses on helping financial institutions address the financial impacts of climate change.3
Clarke has expertise in climate risk modeling and has contributed to developing methodologies for assessing climate-related losses and damages. He co-authored an opinion piece in 'Nature' proposing a mechanism to make climate loss and damage funding work effectively.1 This work involves using physical risk modeling to assess future climate change-related impacts and calculate funding figures for vulnerable regions.1
Additionally, Clarke is involved in developing open-source climate risk models within the OS-Climate initiative, which aims to support climate-aligned finance initiatives.1 His work contributes to advancing the understanding of how climate change affects economic risks and how to quantify these impacts for financial decision-making.
It's important to note that this Richard H. Clarke should not be confused with Richard A. Clarke, the former U.S. government official and national security expert.2
Highlights
My reaction to the IFoA report – there’s a high level of agreement
The IFoA (Institute and Faculty of Actuaries)’ report ‘The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios – a warning for financial services’ is causing a stir*: climate extremes and chaos are coming much faster than even the scientific consensus had expected. For this reason, the authors (Sandy Trust, Sanjay Joshi, Professor Tim Lenton, and Jack Oliver) are proposing different modelling strategies. There’s a widely accepted ‘quadratic model’ that showed the US would suffer a 1% GDP impact from 1°C of warming**. It now looks weak.
The authors propose to use simple logistic damage functions. If we compare these catastrophic outcomes with what Ortec Finance and Cambridge Econometrics are predicting, the damages we project (rather than assume) are already quite well aligned with their suggestions.
We use damage functions calibrated on historical data. Note that we find that the suggested logistic damage functions probably underestimate risks with warming levels up to 2.25 degrees. The impacts appear negligible, but they probably are not, as we are already experiencing now across three continents. It is as if time has fast forwarded to 2050!
Beyond 3°C, earth system feedbacks may release so much carbon that even if man-made emissions reduce, the global economy could collapse anyway (-100%).
- https://lnkd.in/ekkngPzT ** https://lnkd.in/e2eSSmpg
