Climate risk identification: WayCarbon launches SaaS offer
WayCarbon, the largest strategic consultancy with an exclusive focus on sustainability and climate change in Latin America, announces launch of the MOVE (Model for Vulnerability Evaluation) solution’s SaaS offer, an integrated tool for identifying the exposure of different sectors to the physical risk associated with climate changes, with essential information to help companies define and prioritize their climate adaptation strategies.
The MOVE launch can help, for example, the agribusiness, energy, and infrastructure sectors, which are more exposed to damage caused by physical risks related to the climate. “Although extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, are increasingly intense in Brazil and in the world, their impact on business, in general, is not yet internalized in the strategic scope of companies. We launched MOVE to help our clients to assess the financial exposure of the climate change impact on the corporate risk matrix, manage these risks and meet the growing demand from investors. Also, increasingly more companies are looking for reliable information of high technical complexity”, evaluates Melina Amoni, Climate Risk Manager at WayCarbon, who lead MOVE development.
In March of this year, Grupo Santander announced an agreement for the 80% of WayCarbon purchase. The acquisition is an important step in further enhancing the Bank’s sustainability offerings to support clients in all markets in their transitions to a low-carbon economy.
Through MOVE, companies can simulate and quantify the impact of climate change in different geographical, temporal and scenarios of concentration of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) and socioeconomic paths, considering how the probability of the flooding risk, waves heat, meteorological drought, and forest fires, among others, may impact its infrastructure, operation and value chain, in order to facilitate the decision-making process, aligning sectoral and strategic sensitivity.
Created in 2014 to support the development of risk analyzes and climate adaptation plans for clients in the public and private sectors, MOVE has already been used internally by WayCarbon’s consulting area to support companies such as Natura &Co, Braskem, Usiminas, Lojas Renner, Lojas Americanas, EDP and Ecorodovias, in addition to the cities of Belo Horizonte, Betim, Curitiba, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo, Sorocaba and Cartago and Manizales, in Colombia.
The solution stands out for being the only one on the market to include, in its vast database, statistics and geospatial analyzes specific to the Brazilian reality, the result of almost a decade of investment by WayCarbon in its development. The dedicated multidisciplinary team comprises around 30 professionals such as developers, geologists, biologists, and meteorologists.
“Applicable in different thematic and productive areas on multiple scales, MOVE interprets different socioeconomic and greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration scenarios to produce georeferenced and statistical data that integrate climate risk management into corporate business and sectoral planning and territorial, using state-of-the-art scientific evidence, such as projections from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)”, says Melina.
Obligation to report climate risk is a trend in the market
Financial disclosure of the companies’ climate risk, especially publicly traded ones, is driven globally by the TCFD (Task-Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures), an initiative created by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), to make companies aware of the climate change impact on business, facilitate the communication of climate-related information and direct investments towards low-carbon activities.
Although still voluntary, the TCFD recommendations have been widely adopted globally by companies from different sectors of the economy, which demonstrates a growing level of maturity and market acceptance of the Task Force’s proposals and a tendency for more regulatory bodies to make such disclosures mandatory related to climate, following the example of the SEC (U.S Securities and Exchange Commission), in the United States, and the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority), in the United Kingdom.
In Brazil, there is an expectation that similar regulations will be published by the CVM (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários, in Portuguese), expanding the mandatory disclosure requirements on the climate in a more explicit way for all companies listed on the B3. “Several publicly traded companies seek to anticipate and prepare for the challenges of adapting to new regulatory and investor requirements,” Melina points out.
