Assessing Water Resilience: The Intersection of Credit Ratings and Climate Adaptation
15 January 2025; 3-4:30 p.m. GMT
Zoom Webinars Platform
Credit rating agencies communicate measurements of trust and risk to investors on a massive scale – and a level of the expectation of quality and investor appetite to institutions that seek funding. The financial flows for the global bonds market alone is estimated at more than 130 trillion USD annually. Credit rating agencies play an important role in lending practices, investment, and regulatory frameworks, forming a pillar of the broader economy.
Climate change impacts remain a relatively new perspective for how we evaluate, score, and compare investments, though instruments that purport to disclose these approaches are rapidly becoming mainstreamed and normalized as part of disclosure, evaluation, and rating systems. To date, they have emphasized high-confidence physical risks, such as from extreme heat, air quality, and flooding. Broader system-level risks (e.g., electrical grids and regional water supply), black swan events, the challenges associated with climatic transitions, and climate-related governance risks are much less widely captured and scored though they may be more significant and indeed important for investors and regulators to perceive and understand than direct physical risks. Moreover, our ability to also describe and weight the potential for adaptation and resilience benefits through credit rating systems is nascent.
How do we ensure that credit rating systems are capable of communicating both the level of potential risk and incentivizing systemic resilience? Do we need to disclose drivers and risks beyond the influence of direct physical threats? Is the absence of broader perspectives on risk important for the larger economy? Are new insights, such as the ability of water resilience interventions to promote coherence in climate action, important for credit ratings?
This webinar is part of an ongoing series from the Water Resilience for Economic Resilience (WR4ER) initiative.
Speakers & Panelists
Ram Sri - Vice President, Sustainable Finance – Credit, Moody’s Ratings
Michael Brown - Global Cities Lead, Climate Bonds Initiative & former bonds lead at San Francisco Public Utility
Mario Lootz-Petersen [Moderator] - Senior Policy Officer for Water and Circular Economy, German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Claudia Sadoff - Former Executive Managing Director of CGIAR & former Lead Economist and Global Lead for Water Security and Water Resources Management, World Bank
