The Bank of Italy today publishes 'Climate and environmental risks: measuring the exposure of investments', the new issue of the series 'Markets, infrastructures, payment systems'.
This paper presents a number of methodologies for assessing the climate risk exposure of several financial asset classes. Regarding government bonds, the paper proposes using public information; in order to develop forward-looking measures of countries' risk exposure, the paper uses historical trends combined with governments' climate commitments and the scenarios developed by the Network for Greening the Financial System. With regard to private sector issuers, the paper finds quite a high coverage and correlation amongst the carbon emissions data from different providers, while the divergences in the data for other environmental indicators are still significant. Finally, the paper shows that the application of sustainability criteria in the Bank of Italy's investment strategy delivered a non-negligible reduction in the exposure to the climate and environmental risks of the portfolios.
