Water Risk and Its Impact on the Financial Markets and Society

Water Risk and Its Impact on the Financial Markets and Society
Author: Thomas Walker
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2021-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030776506

Download Water Risk and Its Impact on the Financial Markets and Society Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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 Risk and Its Impact on the Financial Markets and Society

Water Risk and Its Impact on the Financial Markets and Society
Author: Thomas Walker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9783030776510

Download Water Risk and Its Impact on the Financial Markets and Society Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Water Risk Modeling

Water Risk Modeling
Author: Dieter Gramlich
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2023-02-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031238117

Download Water Risk Modeling Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook 2021

OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook 2021
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre:
ISBN: 9264852395

Download OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook 2021 Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Bridging Physical and Financial Business Water Risk

Bridging Physical and Financial Business Water Risk
Author: Peter Adriaens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 28
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

Download Bridging Physical and Financial Business Water Risk Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System

Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System
Author: Leonardo Martinez-Diaz
Publisher: U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-09-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 057874841X

Download Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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

A Capital Markets-Based Water Risk Assessment of Key Industrial Water Users in the Great Lakes Region

A Capital Markets-Based Water Risk Assessment of Key Industrial Water Users in the Great Lakes Region
Author: Anthony Arnold
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

Download A Capital Markets-Based Water Risk Assessment of Key Industrial Water Users in the Great Lakes Region Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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 Municipal Bond Market and Water Utilities

The Municipal Bond Market and Water Utilities
Author: Erika May Smull
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

Download The Municipal Bond Market and Water Utilities Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Water Supply and Water Scarcity

Water Supply and Water Scarcity
Author: Vasileios A. Tzanakakis
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3039433067

Download Water Supply and Water Scarcity Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This Book includes selected papers that has been published in the Water journal Special Issue (SI) on Water Supply and Water Scarcity. Moreover, an overview of the SI is included. The papers selected for publication in the SI include review and research papers on water history, on water management issues under water scarcity regimes, on rainwater harvesting, on water quality and degradation, and on climatic variability impacts on water resources. Overall, the issue identify and highlight the main challenges in water sector, and particularly in management and protection of water resources and in use of alternative (non-conventional) water resources, especially in areas with demographic change and climate vulnerability in order to achieve sustainable and secure water supply. Furthermore, general guidelines and possible solutions for an improved and sophisticated water management system are proposed and discussed, such as the adoption of advanced technological solutions and practices that improve water-use efficiency and the use of alternative water resources, to address the growing environmental and health issues and to reduce the emerging conflicts among water users.

OECD Studies on Water Water Security for Better Lives

OECD Studies on Water Water Security for Better Lives
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2013-09-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9264202404

Download OECD Studies on Water Water Security for Better Lives Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This publication examines the critical issues surrounding water security (water shortage, water excess, inadequate water quality, the resilience of freshwater systems), providing a rationale for a risk-based approach and the management of trade-offs between water and other policies.