NEW YORK: Erratic weather is forcing private equity investors to scrutinise a new source of financial risk: whether assets in their portfolios can withstand a changing climate.
For decades, investment models at the world’s largest funds relied on assumptions of a relatively stable climate based on historical data.
But frequent record-breaking weather events triggered by global warming are creating new threats to earnings, asset valuations and exit outcomes for their portfolio companies.
“It’s more about identifying any of the risks that would cause an investment to fall over or present a big bill halfway through the investment period,” said Chetan Chhatwal, a Los Angeles-based partner at Baringa Partners LLP, which advises more than 50 private equity funds on their investments and sold a climate scenario model to BlackRock Inc for its Aladdin Climate platform.
“Anything that prevents that from happening is not box ticking.”
A Bloomberg Green analysis of the latest sustainability reports published by 12 of the largest alternative asset managers showed overall mentions of physical climate risks and related terms nearly doubled from a year before, with Carlyle Group Inc, General Atlantic LP, KKR & Co and Partners Group AG seeing large increases.
Most are now screening their portfolios for vulnerabilities to heat and treating it as a long-term, chronic risk, especially for their combined private equity assets totaling more than US$700bil.
Rich Sorkin, the founder and chief executive officer of analytics firm Jupiter Intelligence Inc, which made more than US$10mil in revenue last year and has been used by Carlyle and Permira, said private equity funds are now among its largest customer base.
Sorkin said funds are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to conduct analysis on “additional insurance costs over time or adaptation investments, the impact on return on Investment”, plus the right timing for the expenditure.
The cost of natural catastrophes such as hurricanes and wildfires has continued to rise in recent years, as a combination of climate change, urbanisation and inflation mean disasters are getting more costly when they hit.
Europe is particularly exposed to extreme heat over the next five years, a stress test conducted by Allianz SE found, with potential combined economic losses of US$638bil across France, Italy, Germany and Spain due to declines in fixed capital formation and reduced consumption.
Now, as weather-related losses affect companies globally, and rules under the International Sustainability Standards Board and European Union regulations require more assessments, investors are starting to conduct additional physical risk analysis pre and post-investment.
The clamour for data centre investments is proving to be another driver as funds try to safeguard their assets.
“It’s good that private equity is waking up to it, but a lot of money has already been tied up, with no way to properly measure or gauge the risk,” said Gautam Ramdurai, founder and principal of corporate advisory firm snowbird global.
Private equity has been a significant source of financing for polluting fossil fuel companies and assets, particularly as public market scrutiny and regulatory pressure have led some traditional capital providers to reduce their exposure. — Bloomberg
