EDHEC Climate Institute Publications
ERCII publications
Rebuilding Trust in Net-Zero Targets - Five Structural Shifts in the SBTi Draft Corporate Net-Zero Standard and What They Could Deliver
2025
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has become the leading global standard-setter for corporate climate action. More than 7,500 companies—representing a majority of global stock market capitalisation—have had near-term emissions reduction targets validated by the SBTi. These typically span 5–10 years and align with pathways consistent with the Paris Agreement. Over 1,600 companies have taken a further step by adopting targets under the more demanding SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard. As concerns have mounted over the credibility, integrity, and effectiveness of climate pledges...
Climate Salience and the Demand for Green Stocks by Mutual Funds
2024
This study is the second output of the Research Chair «Measuring and Managing Climate Risks in Investment Portfolios» established at EDHEC-Risk Climate Impact Institute with the support of Amundi. Building upon our previous research, which explored the relationship between climate change news and equity market returns, this new study shifts focus to how climate awareness influences the investment decisions of mutual fund managers worldwide. While high-frequency algorithmic trading dominates intraday market activity, active mutual fund managers remain key...
How Does Climate Risk Affect Global Equity Valuations? A Novel Approach
2024
This research examines the impact of climate change-induced transition costs and physical damages on global equity valuation by pricing equity as the sum of discounted claims on consumption across climate and economic scenarios consistent with different greenhouse gas emissions trajectories. Methodological Contributions: This work innovatively combines asset pricing techniques with an upgraded integrated climate economics model. It benefits from three distinctive methodological innovations: Full Probabilistic Treatment: We rigorously address the uncertainty inherent in both the...
Decarbonization and the Pace of Economic Growth
2024
We use an adaptation of a popular Integrated Assessment Model according to which the carbon intensity, the rate of growth of the population and the cost of abatement technologies all strongly fall with GDP per person to explore whether this implies that the end-of-century temperature will be lower in states of high or low economic output (whether a ‘climate Kuznets curve’ is predicted by the model.) We find that, despite what we call the ‘technological optimism’ of the model, high (low) temperature outcomes are strongly associated with high (low) states of GDP or GDP per person....
The Link Between Physical and Transition Risk
2024
We argue that what is usually referred to as climate ‘transition risk’ can be more usefully decomposed in an expectation part and a variability around this central value. We show that there is a strong inverse relationship between the expectation component of transition costs and the expectation of physical damages, and how this relationship can be estimated. Our results indicate that the uncertainty in transition costs decreases as the abatement policy becomes more aggressive (and physical damage decrease), but remains large as a fraction of the expectation component. We also...
Using Taxonomies to Qualify the Sustainability of Infrastructure Investments - The Infrastructure Asset Class Under the EU Green Taxonomy
2024
This paper addresses the problem of mapping the infrastructure asset class to the activities of the EU Taxonomy. This mapping process not only tackles a crucial hurdle but also contributes to a deeper understanding of how green taxonomies can be effectively applied to the infrastructure asset class. Summary The EU Taxonomy, is the first global effort to address environmental sustainability and to provide a robust framework for classifying economic activities based on their environmental impact. However, the application of an activity-based green taxonomy for categorising infrastructure...
Scope for Divergence - A review of the importance of value chain emissions, the state of disclosure, estimation and modelling issues, and recommendations for companies, investors, and standard setters
2024
This policy report offers comprehensive insights into accounting for greenhouse gas emissions throughout companies’ value chains, and the challenges this process poses to companies and investors. Regulators are caught up in the contentious debate between investors and environmental NGOs who favour disclosure and business organisations and politicians representing fossil fuel interests who oppose it. The European Union requires the construction of its climate benchmarks to be steered by value chain emissions and has mandated corporate reporting of these emissions when material; across...
EDHEC-Risk Climate Impact Institute’s Response to the European Supervisory Authorities’ Call for Evidence on Greenwashing
2024
The demand for investments integrating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) dimensions has increased significantly in the past decade and the assets that financial intermediaries claim to manage responsibly and sustainably have close to trebled, reportedly growing to represent a third of overall assets under management. However, the industry-accepted definition of sustainable and responsible investing is nothing if not inclusive (Ducoulombier, 2023). As incorporating ESG issues into investment management now suffices to claim the responsible investment badge, the industry...
Climate Scenario Analysis and Stress Testing for Investors: A Probabilistic Approach
2024
The use of stress testing and scenario analysis is a generally accepted concept in financial risk management. However, climate scenarios are different in two respects: because they cannot be built by ‘resampling’ past history (as we have not encountered yet instances of the climate damages whose effects we want to explore); and because the end users of the scenarios are unlikely to be able to associate them even with very approximate probabili- ties (again, this is due to the unprecedented nature of climate change in historical times). In this paper, the authors therefore propose a framework...
Computing Extreme Climate Value for Infrastructure Investments: Asset Pricing Applied to NGFS Phase 4 and Oxford Economics Scenarios to Measuring Climate Risks at the Asset Level
2024
This paper describes the novel method that we have developed to measure climate risks. While we here apply this method to infrastructure assets, it paves the way to using similar approaches to enlarge the scope of its application. Summary Investors in infrastructure assets are increasingly concerned by the risks posed by climate change. Indeed, extreme weather events can damage physical assets, leading to direct losses, increased maintenance costs, and lower asset values (e.g., the deadly flood in north-eastern Italy in May 2023). Such risks are referred to as physical risks. To...
Physical climate risk survey: those in the infrastructure investment industry are concerned and lack data
2024
Investors are concerned about physical climate risk and believe that they have almost no idea how it will affect unlisted infrastructure assets; that’s the clear message they delivered when we surveyed them on their views regarding the risks to the asset class. Summary Investors and other industry professionals are concerned about physical climate risk and believe that they have almost no idea how it will affect unlisted infrastructure assets; that’s the clear message they delivered when we surveyed them on their views regarding the risks to the asset class and whether they feel the...
Portfolio Losses from Climate Damages: A Guide for Long-Term Investors
2023
UK Local Government Pension Scheme authorities have experimented with reporting on their governance and management of climate risks, responding to challenges by non-governmental organisations and anticipating regulatory developments. Drawing on advice provided by investment consultants, their reports have included simulations of the impact of climate-related scenarios on investments suggesting that portfolios would only be marginally impacted, even in high temperature scenarios. In this paper, the author discusses the (de)merits of the advice addressed to pension trustees and engages with...
Value versus Values: What Is the Sign of the Climate Risk Premium?
2023
Given the conflicting messages about the magnitude and sign of the climate risk premium provided by the empirical studies to date, the author undertakes a theoretical estimation of the sign of the risk premium. He finds that, in absence of tipping points, the payoff of green (brown) securities covaries positively (negatively) with consumption growth, and should therefore command a positive (negative) risk premium. In a world without sharp and large discontinuities in damages green securities should not therefore be expected to act as effective climate hedges...
Highway to Hell: Climate Risks will cost hundreds of billions to investors in infrastructure before 2050
2023
This paper presents an assessment of transition and physical risks in the privately invested infras-tructure sector. Leveraging the NGFS scenarios, we quantify the costs associated with delayed or uncoordinated transition and evaluate the potential portfolio value loss resulting from physical risks in the absence of climate action. We measure company-level transition risk as the difference in Net Asset Value (NAV) between disorderly and orderly scenarios. First, we analyze the statistical relationship between infrastructure companies’ total assets, revenues, operational expenses (OPEX),...
The Impact of Climate Change News on Low-minus-High Carbon Intensity Portfolios
2023
Several pioneering papers have already examined the link between climate news and equity market returns with a view to isolating “climate beta” that could be used to construct climate-risk hedging portfolios with easy-to-trade assets. However, this study applies the latest natural language processing methods to construct climate news indices from newspaper articles. Linguistic dictionary, lexical sentiment-based techniques, and state-of-the-art transformer-based models are used to capture climate change concerns in leading newspapers over the 2005-2021 period. Daily indices are built for...
It’s getting physical: Some investors in infrastructure could lose more than half of their portfolio to physical climate risks by 2050
2023
This research note shows that the physical risks created by climate change are not limited to a distant future for investors in infrastructure, some of whom could well lose more than 50% of the value of their portfolio to physical climate risk before 2050 in the event of runaway climate change. Moreover, the average investor will also lose twice as much to extreme weather, mostly in OECD countries, compared to a low carbon scenario. In this note, we describe our approach to measure baseline physical risks (today) and how physical risks would materialise from that baseline in...
Asleep at the Wheel? The Risk of Sudden Price Adjustments for Climate Risk
2023
A large number of studies has failed to date to identify a robust and economically significant climate risk premium or climate beta, either at the aggregate or at the sectoral level. The author examines several explanations of why this may be the case, and finds that a mispricing of climate risk is the most likely explanation. If this is true, price adjustments will eventually occur, either in a gradual or in an abrupt way. This is a novel source of risk, which should be on the radar screen of long-term investors. Three key takeaways: The author...
The Global Transboundary Climate Risk Report
2023
As their name suggests, transboundary climate risks do not respect national or international borders. They are being triggered by climate change and by our adaptation responses to that challenge. A climate hazard in one country may well have an impact that crosses national borders to affect its neighbours. In our interconnected world, however, its impact may also jump across entire regions and vast oceans to harm distant countries. From flooding in Bangkok that disrupts global industrial production, to the spread of diseases that hold back economies, transboundary climate risks are an...
Time-varying Environmental Betas and Latent Green Factors
2023
In this working paper entitled "Time-varying Environmental Betas and Latent Green Factors", the authors study whether the US stock market is pricing exposures to climate risks through the lense of a latent linear factor model with time-varying betas estimable by an extension of the instrumented principal component analysis (IPCA) of Kelly, Pruitt, and Su (2019). In their specification, the factor loadings are allowed to be functions of both “financial” and environmental (“green”) company specific characteristics, such as ESG ratings and carbon intensity. They extend the...
Optimal Climate Policy with Negative Emissions
2023
We can limit the future temperature impact of climate change in two ways: reducing our use of CO2 emitting fuels as an energy source (abatement), and using negative emission technologies (NETs) to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere (removal). Using a modification of the DICE model, authors analyse the optimal use of these two policy responses to climate change. After calibrating the marginal costs of abatement and CO2 removal to the latest scientific information, they find that carbon removal must play a very important role in an optimal...
Physical Risks & the Cost of Capital of Infrastructure Investments: Flood damage factor estimation and bond yields in U.S. airports
2022
In this paper, we develop a methodology to calculate the potential damage associated with different types of physical risks at the asset level, and conduct a practical implementation for flood damages in the airport sector in the United States. We then use these results to analyse the relationship between airports’ capital costs and exposure to physical climate risk. Using a new dataset of 470 airports, including over 1,000 runways and more than 800 terminal buildings, we use a 30-meter resolution flood model for a 50-year return period (2% probability) and an airport-specific damage...
Carbon Footprints and Financial Performance of Transport Infrastructures: the Case of Airports - Transition risk assessment using traffic and geospatial data
2022
Transition risk assessment using traffic and geospatial data In this paper, we develop a methodology to estimate the carbon footprint of thousands of airport infrastructures around the world and test for the existence of a relationship between carbon emissions and realised or expected returns in the private airport investment sector. We propose a consistent methodology to assess the scopes 1, 2 and 3 of infrastructure companies (in this case Airports) and implement it for several thousands entities around the world. We use detailed geospatial and traffic data to predict scope 1 and 2...
The Pricing of Green Infrastructure: The realised and expected financial performance of green power infrastructure investment, 2010-2021
2022
In this paper, we examine the impact on realised performance of this permanent shift in investor preferences for low carbon energy investments, and how it relates to the expected returns of green power investments. We show that while green infrastructure has outperformed the ‘Core’ infrastructure market over the past decade, this is largely the result of excess demand for such assets that has pushed asset prices up and discount rates down. We find that controlling for a number of risk factors that are present in the returns of unlisted infrastructure equity investment, there is no persistent...
Does the rise ofrenewable energy create newrisks forinvestors?: Insights from 20 years of energy transition in the UK
2022
This research note examines the impact on the risk profile of wind and solar power investments of the increasing dominance of renewables in the energy mix of a given country. As green power sources that are intermittent become central to a power system, without commercially viable medium- and long-term storage options, what is the likely impact on the electricity market and system as a whole and do wind and solar investments, which have historically benefited from a safer, privileged position in the power sector, become riskier? We use the case of the UK as an example of an economy that...
The Agency of Greenwashing
2022
As climate change increasingly challenges business models, the disclosure of firm environmental performance casts growing attention by corporate stakeholders. This creates wider opportunities and incentives for greenwashing behaviors. We propose a novel measure of greenwashing and investigate its determinants and consequences for US firms. We show the that board characteristics are variously associated with the apparent degree of corporate greenwashing. Importantly, we find that greenwashing reduces firm value
Institutional Investors and Corporate Carbon Footprint: Global Evidence
2021
Climate-aware institutional investors are assumed to affect the transition towards a low carbon economy by exercising their prerogatives as owners of global companies. Investors concerned with climate change can influence investee companies’ carbon footprint by voting at shareholder meetings on climate-related issues and by actively engaging with executives and board members. Authors study to what extent institutional investors’ ownership affected corporate carbon emissions in 68 countries for the period of 2007 to 2018. Results show that institutional investment on average does not...
Measuring and Managing ESG Risks in Sovereign Bond Portfolios and Implications for Sovereign Debt Investing
2021
This study, “Measuring and Managing ESG Risks in Sovereign Bond Portfolios and Implications for Sovereign Debt Investing" demonstrates that implementation choices regarding how ESG constraints are incorporated in the context of sovereign bond portfolio construction have a material impact on this opportunity cost. In particular, we find that higher environmental scores for developed countries and higher social scores for emerging countries are associated with lower costs of borrowing for issuers and consequently with lower yields for investors. We also confirm that negative screening leads to...
Climate Change and Credit Risk
2020
Authors investigate the relationship between exposure to climate change and firm credit risk. They show that the distance-to-default, a widely used market-based measure of corporate default risk, is negatively associated with the amount of a firm’s carbon emissions and carbon intensity. Therefore, companies with high carbon footprint are perceived by the market as more likely to default, ceteris paribus. The carbon footprint decreases the distance-to-default following shocks - such as the Paris Agreement - that reveal policymakers’ intention to implement stricter climate policies. Overall,...
Performance of Socially Responsible Investment Funds against an Efficient SRI Index: The Impact of Benchmark Choice when Evaluating Active Managers - An Update
2012
This paper conducts a performance measurement of SRI funds and assesses the impact of changing the reference from a standard SRI index to an efficient SRI index. The analysis of fund performance shows that an efficient SRI index raises the bar for actively managed SRI funds. While about 62% of funds have a positive information ratio when compared to the cap-weighted EuroStoxx Sustainability Index, only about 36% of funds do so with respect to the Efficient SRI Index. It is also interesting to note that the median information ratio across funds is slightly positive (0.04) when using the...
The Performance of Socially Responsible Investment and Sustainable Development in France: An Update after the Financial Crisis
2010
In an initial study done in 2008, EDHEC-Risk Institute established that socially responsible (SRI) funds—those funds made by selecting securities that meet ESG (environmental, social, governance) criteria—distributed in France did not produce both positive and statistically significant alpha. That study, which relied on the Fama-French three-factor model, covered a six-year period ending in December 2007, thus not including the recent financial crisis. The purpose of the present study was to update these results by extending the analysis to the years 2008 and 2009.
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