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Water risks, including the lack of access to fresh water for personal and industrial use, droughts, floods, and water contamination, are problems that are not new, yet, they are amplifying in the face of climate change, population growth, and rapid economic development. Properly identifying, measuring, and managing these risks as well as taking advantage of related mitigation opportunities is essential for the future well-being of firms across various industries, investors who invest in these firms, local and federal governments, and ultimately our society as a whole. This edited book sheds light on this topic by examining the unique measurement and modelling challenges associated with either the scarcity or overabundance of water and their interaction with finance and society. Specifically, it explores approaches to assess and operationalize water risk, examines the vulnerability of institutions and markets, and discusses strategies for risk mitigation.
Water risks, including the lack of access to fresh water for personal and industrial use, droughts, floods, and water contamination, are problems that are not new, yet, they are amplifying in the face of climate change, population growth, and rapid economic development. Properly identifying, measuring, and managing these risks as well as taking advantage of related mitigation opportunities is essential for the future well-being of firms across various industries, investors who invest in these firms, local and federal governments, and ultimately our society as a whole. This edited book sheds light on this topic by examining the unique measurement and modelling challenges associated with either the scarcity or overabundance of water and their interaction with finance and society. Specifically, it explores approaches to assess and operationalize water risk, examines the vulnerability of institutions and markets, and discusses strategies for risk mitigation. Thomas Walker is Professor of Finance and Concordia University Research Chair in Emerging Risk Management at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Prior to academia, he worked for several years in the German consulting and industrial sector at Mercedes Benz, Utility Consultants International, Lahmeyer International, Telenet, and KPMG Peat Marwick. Dieter Gramlich is Professor of Banking & Finance at DHBW - Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University in Heidenheim, Germany, where he serves as Head of the Banking Department. He previously studied at the University of Mannheim and was an interim professor and Chair of Banking and Finance at the University of Halle in Germany. Kalima Vico is a research associate at the Emerging Risks Information Centre (ERIC) at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She previously worked for Concordia's David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise. Adèle Dumont-Bergeron is an MA student in English literature and creative writing at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She currently serves as a research associate at the Emerging Risks Information Centre.
This book sheds light on the topic of financial water risk by examining the modeling challenges associated with physical, regulatory, and reputational water risk in finance. It explores various approaches to operationalize water risk from a financial analysis, investment management, and climate science perspective. The analysis of tools to assess water risk provides the basis for the development of appropriate risk-return management techniques in finance and beyond. This book provides new insights by focusing on financial water threats and their related opportunities. It will be of interest to both academics and practitioners who work at the interface of finance, economics, nature, and society.
The impact of water as a constrained resource for business operations is becoming part of the investor discourse on equity water risk. A key challenge is the absence of metrics that relate physical risk to financial risk, either at the company or at the portfolio level, resulting in the lack of asset risk pricing. Our research tests the hypothesis that water risk impacts revenue and the cost of doing business and, by inference stock volatility, unless the company manages its risk appropriately. We related stock volatility metrics and water risk exposures of four electric utilities during a two-year period (2007-2008) that captured multiple drought events, commodity (coal) price fluctuations, and systemic risk in the financial markets. Using waterBeta and waterVaR metrics, the impact of water risk on stock volatility (VaR) was highly dependent on the value chain position of the firm, the capital efficiency of water, and stock elasticity. WaterVaR values range from $5M for the Southern Company to $167M for AES. The use of financial risk metrics for water can improve decisions for asset allocation to reduce water risk exposure in portfolios, including stranded assets.
This edition of the OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook reviews developments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for government borrowing needs, funding conditions and funding strategies in the OECD area.
This publication serves as a roadmap for exploring and managing climate risk in the U.S. financial system. It is the first major climate publication by a U.S. financial regulator. The central message is that U.S. financial regulators must recognize that climate change poses serious emerging risks to the U.S. financial system, and they should move urgently and decisively to measure, understand, and address these risks. Achieving this goal calls for strengthening regulators’ capabilities, expertise, and data and tools to better monitor, analyze, and quantify climate risks. It calls for working closely with the private sector to ensure that financial institutions and market participants do the same. And it calls for policy and regulatory choices that are flexible, open-ended, and adaptable to new information about climate change and its risks, based on close and iterative dialogue with the private sector. At the same time, the financial community should not simply be reactive—it should provide solutions. Regulators should recognize that the financial system can itself be a catalyst for investments that accelerate economic resilience and the transition to a net-zero emissions economy. Financial innovations, in the form of new financial products, services, and technologies, can help the U.S. economy better manage climate risk and help channel more capital into technologies essential for the transition. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5247742
This project explores capital markets risk exposure from water use in key industrial sectors in the Great Lakes region, represented by a subset of the region's largest companies and water users. The largest industrial water users in the Great Lakes region include (in decreasing order): thermoelectric, industrial, domestic/public supply, and commercial sectors. It is salient to make the distinction between water withdrawal and consumptive use, whereby the former is largely returned to the source reservoir after use in business operations, and the latter is removed from available supplies.Industry-specific water risks can be viewed through several lenses: watershed stewardship, impact of water as a natural resource constraint on corporate operations, and risk pricing of water in the capital markets as a result of curtailed operations and growth. The approach taken here builds on portfolio theory by integrating share price trends, with corporate accounting and voluntary disclosure data to extract a share price volatility risk metric - waterBeta - reflective of water and weather risk. The approach leverages signal processing waterBeta algorithms developed by Equarius Risk Analytics, a fintech firm, which prices water/weather risk directly into share price volatility, as a risk premium. The signal is derived from value-at-risk (VaR) models, which captures the short term 'tail' of extreme market volatility risks in share price behavior relative to industry and sector-specific benchmarks. Simply put, a higher waterBeta means a company is more prone to capital market volatility as a result of climate risks. Our results indicate that, by comparing nine companies across four industry sectors, the waterBeta signal is lowest for utilities, followed by health care, consumer discretionary, and industrials. Companies with high waterBeta tend to exhibit a higher degree of tail risk volatility in their short term share price, have a high percentage of facilities operating in water stressed regions, and exhibit low water intensities (WI). Interestingly, these same high waterBeta companies also tend to have high fixed asset turnover ratios, indicating high waterBeta companies are more dependent on fixed assets. Conversely, low waterBeta companies exhibit low VaR, high water intensities and a high percent of facilities in water stressed locations. However, these companies have low fixed asset turnover ratios, and are thus inefficient at generating revenue from fixed assets. Even though our subset of companies was too small for sector-wide generalizations, it appears that when an entity has higher fixed asset turnover ratios, even small changes in water intensity or exposure to high water risk areas can have a significant impact on waterBeta. This is the case with Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). However, the opposite trend can be observed, and is exemplified by the thermoelectric companies, which are the most inefficient at generating revenue from fixed assets and have the highest WI but exhibit the lowest waterBeta values. This is largely due to the fact that thermoelectric plants/companies rely almost exclusively on surface water sources, such as the Great Lakes, and tend to have corporate/industry wide water risk management strategies in place, given their high dependency on water. It should be noted that this capital markets risk at this time provides limited feedback to the companies on how to address this volatility, given that the model is multiparametric. Addressing water intensity (how much water a company uses to generate revenue) only has impact if its efficiency to generate revenue from its physical assets can be addressed. We are currently identifying factors that enable more targeted corporate risk management actions. As noted, the sample in this study was small and regionally focused. Broader universes of companies across multiple sectors such as represented in the '500' index will serve to develop imputation and learning models to scale capital markets-based water risk observations.
The majority of medium- to large-sized municipal water utilities in the United States rely on the 4 trillion USD municipal bond market to finance all or a portion of their operations, maintenance, and capital improvements. Despite the scale and power of the bond market in setting the guardrails for water utilities and local government services, there are limited studies that center municipal bonds in local water management. This dissertation analyzes how the municipal bond market drives and responds to municipal characteristics as expressed through water utility finance. Through empirical, heuristic, and statistical methods, I show that 1) utilities servicing distressed communities are trading off financial risk for affordability risk, 2) nonpayment is only material for water utility finance if nonpayment elasticity exists, and 3) the bond market does not price physical climate risk but does apply a racial yield penalty. The findings have implications for the management of local water utilities as well as broader implications for how infrastructure finance intersects with water management across the U.S.
The United Nations World Water Development Report, published every three years, is a comprehensive review providing an authoritative picture of the state of the world's freshwater resources. It offers best practices as well as in-depth theoretical analyses to help stimulate ideas and actions for better stewardship in the water sector. It is the only report of its kind, resulting from the collaboration and contributions of the 26 UN agencies, commissions, program, funds, secretariats and conventions that have a significant role in addressing global water concerns.The news media are full of talk of crises - in climate change, energy and food and troubled financial markets. These crises are linked to each other and to water resources management. Unresolved, they may lead to increasing political insecurity and conflict.Water is required to meet our fundamental needs and rising living standards and to sustain our planets fragile ecosystems. Pressures on the resource come from a growing and mobile population, social and cultural change, economic development and technological change. Adding complexity and risk is climate change, with impacts on the resource as well as on the sources of pressure on water.The challenges, though substantial, are not insurmountable. The Report shows how some countries have responded. Progress in providing drinking water is heartening, with the Millennium Development Goal target on track in most regions. But other areas remain unaddressed, and after decades of inaction, the problems in water systems are enormous and will worsen if left unattended.Leaders in the water sector can inform decisions outside their domain and manage water resources to achieve agreed socioeconomic objectives and environmental integrity. Leaders in government, the private sector and civil society determine these objectives and allocate human and financial resources to meet them. Recognizing this responsibility, they must act now!Two volume set: 336 + 96 pages (case studies). Includes CD-ROM.Published jointly with UNESCO Publishing.