New climate change risk-screening service launched

Service aims to identify the impact of climate change on a firm’s operations

NEWARK, CA – Risk Management Solutions (RMS) has developed a new service to identify the potential physical impacts of climate change on a company’s property and operations. The RMS Climate Change Risk Screening Service uses RMS’s proprietary natural catastrophe models together with climate model output to stress test the impact of future potential scenarios on business portfolios.

Information on the effects of climate change is combined with a range of physical and operational vulnerability measures – for example, a company’s capacity to adapt, its resiliency, and the sensitivities of its suppliers – to identify ‘hotspots of future risk’. The output is a detailed matrix of both qualitative and quantitative data on key risk factors for each property and operation within a portfolio, alongside a ranking of the properties most at risk to help prioritise adaptation needs.

“Climate change, and the global political and public response to it, presents a range of threats and opportunities for corporations in terms of their risk management, growth strategies and brand positioning,” says Celine Herweijer, director of the RMS climate change practice. “The issue is shifting from a peripheral corporate social responsibility concern to a topic for strategic deliberation among executives and investors worldwide. While investors and risk managers can increasingly analyse the financial implications of climate policy, we have witnessed a demand for a tool to evaluate the physical impacts of climate change adaptation, and developed the new screening service to meet this need.”