Timely, accurate and independent data is crucial to improve our understanding of climate change and its impacts on the environment, land and today’s cities. There is
a significant barrier which prevents effective climate mitigation and adaptatoon risk management from taking place by the investment community in cities. There is
currently no widely applicable methodology or tool to assess climate risks across many assets. The investment community is hungry for a quick and practical approach
to determine the financial risks associated with climate change. Without a way to identify hotspots and rank the assets in terms of risks, investors are left with time
consuming, expensive and ineffective ways to assess climate change risks in a portfolio context.
The RECAM project brings a team with financial, engineering, policy and scientific backgrounds that aim to comprehensively analyze and integrate a plethora of
climate change risks as they pertain to the built environment; resulting in the establishment of an online tool to visualise, highlight, and interact with those climate change risks as they relate to real estate assets. This project shall build upon the Real Estate Portfolio Assessment (REPA) project, which concluded in Dec 2018 as well as extend the analysis done thus far into indirect risk analysis. The REPA project installed Carbon Delta with a simple model that provides insights for real estate
investors and managers into direct climate impacts and risks, though more work is now needed in order to provide the information decision makers need to comprehensively understand risk exposures and get the buy-in from investment teams to integrate climate risk data.
RECAM will deliver major insights for policymakers and city-level decisionmakers. An important output will be publicl y available physical and transition risk
assessments of multiple global city-regions. The team anticipates applications of this data to address climate and environmental risks in adaptation, mitigation and
resilience/remediation. These datasets will be essential for disaster preparedness and response. The project aims to bring the tools and data which are more commonly found in financial institutions to the non-traditional environment of the city office to really empower authorities to curb global warming to 1.5°C, or the 2°C goal envisioned in the Paris Agreement. The learnings from working closely with a handful of cities will also form a methodological framework on identifying and quantifying climate change risks that can be applied to other cities around the world.
Finally, through consultation with members of the Property Working Group at the UN EPFI, Carbon Delta has assembled a team consisting of five CKIC partners, as well
as a team of 7 real estate investors, that are eager to collaborate on climate impact analysis in cities. This team’s work will culminate within an online real estate
assessment tool and deliver the analysis that investors are now searching for.