Firms that analyse climate risks are the latest hot property
Nov 23rd 2019SOON AFTER Hurricane Sandy battered Manhattan in 2012, Emilie Mazzacurati founded a firm in California to analyse the risks posed by climate change to business. She called it Four Twenty Seven, after the state’s target of lowering annual greenhouse-gas emissions to the equivalent of 427m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020. That reference quickly became outdated. The target was adjusted for technical reasons two years later, and rendered moot in 2018 by the announcement of a net-zero goal. Ms Mazzacurati is still happy with the name, though. “That is the risk of doing business in an uncertain climate,” she says.Such uncertainty has sent financial firms scrambling to buy climate-service providers, as such firms are known. In July Moody’s, a credit-rating agency, bought a majority stake in Four Twenty Seven. In September MSCI, an equity-index maker, snapped up Carbon Delta, a climate-service startup. Wells Fargo invested in Climate Service. In March CO-Firm, based in Hamburg, was bought by PwC, a consultancy. In a funding round earlier this year Jupiter Intelligence, another climate-data outfit, added three insurance firms to its backers.Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address