Accelerating threat of climate change raises the urgency of commitment to climate transition,

including the important role of global financial markets to align investments with net zero.

John Duncan, CEO of Asteria, explains why finance and investment play a central role in the climate transition.

Globally there is scientific consensus that the accumulation of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is driving

a change in climate patterns, both in terms of scale, severity and intensity of events.

The cost of these events has risen sharply, as is evidenced by the claims reported by re-insurers.

So there's certainly strong evidence that the physical impacts of a changing climate is both an urgent and pressing issue for us collectively.

In respect to addressing the long-run climate issues as well as transition, there are several important actors, which includes government, business, finance and

society, and each of them has a very specific role to play. For example, it's the role of government

to set regulation, while it's that of finance

and investment sectors to deploy capital and manage risk and impact outcomes. Given that solving

for long-run climate risk requires the decarbonization of several different economic sectors,

including primary energy production, material production, transport, chemical manufacturing,

to name a few, there certainly is a large amount of capital that will need to be deployed

in these sectors in order to shift technology, process and innovations and efficiency, all of

which need to be funded either through debt or equity

instruments. And so in respect of this, the catalytic role of finance is critical in respect

of the transition. Specifically, I would say that there are three roles that the finance sector can

play in terms of scaling and supporting the

climate and energy transition. The first is to really manage for downside climate risk, which is

really understanding the extent to which the physical impacts of a changing climate can impact

the viability of an asset and or understand the extent

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