Beyond 1.5 Series | Internalizing risk: What 1.5°C (and beyond) looks like

Welcome everyone. I am Heather Goldstone. I'm Chief Communications Officer at Woodwell Climate Research center, and I'm really thrilled to have you all here with us for the debut event in our Beyond 1.5 series. We hope you'll join us for all five events as this series really has been intended and designed to provide a communal process for confronting the full magnitude of the climate emergency that we currently face, and for coming out of that process not overwhelmed in fear and depressed, but rather invigorated with a sense of urgency, ambition, vision and motivation. Before we get started, I would like to thank the Knub family for their support of this series. While While we of course all enjoy and miss gathering in person, these virtual events do have their benefits. They enable us to convene larger and more diverse groups, which we greatly appreciate and we thank all of you for being here today. I also want to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you today from the traditional and sacred lands of the Wampanoag people who have lived here on what we often call Cape Cod for thousands of years, and whose language, culture, traditions all continue to be a vibrant part of our community. Indigenous leadership, knowledge and stewardship are invaluable in the global effort to restore a safe and stable climate. Of course, safe and stable is not where we are right now, and that's why we are all here today. The international climate goal set in the Paris Agreement six years ago was to limit total average global warming to less than 1.5 degrees C above pre industrial levels. The latest assessment from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their assessment of the physical science of climate change released earlier this summer, indicates that human activities to date have already committed us to hitting that mark early next decade. Now keep in mind, that was a mark we were trying not to hit. So the question now is, what happens after 1.5? Do we stabilize global temperatures and our climate? Could we reverse course and wind up at a lower temperature? Or will we allow continued warming? The answer depends on the decisions that we make and the actions that we take now and in coming years and decades. There are impacts that are now inevitable and we have to understand those in order to prepare and adapt to the extent that that is possible, and we will talk about that today. But there are also even greater risks that we can still avert. Doing so will take swift and dramatic action, and that's not the course that we are currently on. Another UN report released just last week finds that current climate policies and commitments put us on track to far overshoot 1.5 C, hitting as much as 2.7 degrees C of warming in this century. All of this means we must increase ambition and action and understanding climate risk is has the power to help us do that. So, without further ado, let me introduce our panelists for today's discussion of the risks we face and how we confront those risks and turn that into action. Dr. Christopher Schwalm leads Woodwell Climate's risk program, which is the hub of the partnerships that bring us together today. Wendy Cromwell is Vice Chair Director of Sustainable Investment and Portfolio Manager at Wellington Management, one of the world's largest asset management firms and a Woodwell climate partner since 2018. Thank you for being with us, Wendy. Dr. Helen Adams is a Senior Lecturer in Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation at King's College London, and she is currently serving as the Head of Science engagement for the COP26 presidency. What are we, six weeks, I think, from COP26. So, Helen, thank you for making time in what I'm sure is a frenetic schedule at this point for this event today. And last, but certainly not least, Alison Smart is the Executive Director of Probable Futures, a brand new climate risk communication initiative. And by brand new, I mean that. Well, Alison is announcing their launch imminently here in the next few minutes. And Alison, we are thrilled and excited as, I guess, our newest partner, this is. This has grown out of Woodwell's risk science and is a deep partnership between Woodwell and Probable Futures. And so why don't you start us off with a little bit of introduction to what Probable Futures actually is, the gap you're trying to fill and what you're hoping people can do with this new platform that you're creating.

Great.

Thanks, Heather. And a happy equinox back to you and to everyone on this webinar. And a happy one it is indeed for the team at Probable Futures and I think at Woodwell as well, because we're launching something that we really hope will help the world. So I'll start out in answering your question by saying that there's a fundamental concept that I don't think is well known, but really changed the way that I personally think about climate change. That is the fact that we have built our entire civilization upon a stable climate. We have been the incredible beneficiaries of the stable climate that has allowed us to build this complex society that we have today. That stable climate really depends on a stable temperature. With the Probable Futures platform, we really aim to serve as a public resource and as a global utility for actionable climate Change projections that illustrate the potential impacts of losing that stability. As you and many others on this call know, climate scientists over the past 40 years have been building more and more detailed and more and more useful climate change projections. And at Probable Futures, we thought it was critical to translate those projections to and to make them available to everyone in the world in a very understandable and usable way. So I'm going to take a few minutes here to show you what I mean by this and to share some of the maps that are on the Probable Futures platform. And we certainly invite you to visit ProbableFutures.org after today's webinar. So you should be seeing a map of days above 35 degrees C, 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Somebody shout if that's not what you're seeing. And I'm going to take a minute here just to orient you to this map. The first thing I'll point out is just that there is data for most of the world on this map, but not all of it. There are parts of the Arctic that don't include any data. The data ends where the dark gray ends. The dark gray does have data in it, and beyond that it doesn't. The second thing that I'll bring your attention to is the fact that all of this work is organized around these warming scenarios that we've come to recognize very well. What we're looking at right now is a global map of days in a year above 35 degrees C or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. In the past, the past climate, between 1971 and 2000, during that time frame, the Earth had already warmed about 0.5 degrees C beyond pre industrial temperatures. So that's what we're looking at here. And I'm going to move through these warming scenarios so you can see how these maps change and how the number of days of the number of 95° ° days will change as the Earth warms. So this is 1°C. This is essentially where we are today. We've warmed. The Earth has warmed about 1.2 degrees since pre industrial temperatures. And as you can see, we're already seeing big changes in the amount of 95 degree days that many places in the world are experiencing. And also seeing 95 degrees start to creep into places where they have never been experienced before, like northern Europe, northern Canada and parts of the Arctic. This is 1 1/2 degrees C. As Heather mentioned at the beginning of this call, this is absolutely a world and a scenario that we need to be ready for. In fact, we are likely moving directly towards that warming threshold today. Similarly, with 2 degrees C, we still certainly have time to avert this probable future. But we need to be ready for what this world could include. Two and a half degrees C and three degrees C is really a radically different climate. We see South America with areas that have anywhere between a half and the Entire year above 95 degrees C. Same thing in Australia and India. We have places in the Arctic again that have never seen these temperatures before now occurring each year. Now I'm going to zoom in and see what this data and these maps show us when we look at it at a more regional or local level. What we're looking at here is the southwestern United States. I've clicked on a grid cell here right over San Diego. What this map is showing us is that in San Diego in the past they could expect on average about 28 days per year above 95 degrees Fahrenheit. In a cooler year or 10th percentile year, they might experience 10 days. And in a hot year or 90th percentile year, they might experience 49 days over 90. I'm just going to move through and you can see how the numbers change, how the range of possible outcomes expands as we move up to 3 degrees C. I want to make two points about these maps here and this tool. Number one is that temperatures will mean different things in different places. Only the community of San Diego and the decision makers in San Diego really know and understand if they are prepared for temperature scenarios like this. We think of probable futures, the platform not as being an answer generating tool, but helping communities people to ask the right questions and to inform those questions. The second point that I'd like to make about these maps is that San Diego, as it turns out, is not an island. The climate is contiguous. And if you see the changes that are happening here in Arizona, in northern Mexico, in Texas, you can start to ask yourself, are the impacts of the warming climate in those places really going to stay in those places? The answer being no is really kind of a naive answer. And so a tool like this can really help people explore not just what is going to happen in their community, but in surrounding communities and how we can plan for that and address it. So I'm going to just take that away and then I'll answer the second part of your question, Heather, which is how do we hope that people will use this platform? There's really three things. The first is that we hope people will spend time with it and really feel empowered by it to build their own climate literacy. We really can't leave all of this understanding to the scientists only. This is a global problem. It is going to affect all of us. And we all have the capability and the need to really understand the fundamentals of it. The second thing is that we hope people will use it. Climate change projections really, at this point, should be an input into every decision that we make. Whether that's a decision on how a road should be built or how you power your business or where you choose to retire or what you eat. The fact is, we have a good forecast. Climate change forecasts aren't precise and they're not perfect, but they can be really, really useful. We need to start using it then. The third thing is that we hope people will bring their own perspectives and their own imaginations to this platform. Really, you will know best how changes in heat or precipitation or drought will impact business and life and culture in your community. This science will really have the most impact when it is in the hands of the people that it impacts the most. That's our goal. With creating the Probable Futures platform. Woodwell Climate Research center has been an essential partner, and we're just so pleased to share it with you all today.

Well, congratulations on the launch. Just like a new baby. It's been in the works for a while, maybe. Happy birthday, welcome to the world. And we're thrilled to see the launch of Probable Futures. Christopher, I want to turn to you because underlying those maps that Alison was just showing, right, this partnership between Woodwell and Probable Futures is a lot of analysis and work that your team, the risk program here at Woodwell, has done. And Allison's already highlighted a few things that are kind of different about the way that we're working with and presenting risk data. But I wonder if you could dive into that a little bit more. I mean, what is missing from the rest of the world of climate risk data? If we were to take something like, say, an IPCC report or a national climate assessment or some of these other large climate reports that talk about what we're facing in the future, what's missing there, and what else do we need in terms of climate risk data to really be able to make it actionable the way Alison was talking about?

Right. So I think what's missing is a better sense of if the data is, quote, unquote, fit to purpose. And that actually requires me to step back a little bit in the sense that if you think about the history of climate change communication, we as a scientific community haven't been particularly good at communicating the enormity of what Climate change or what climate risk actually means. I'll give you a couple of examples of this. One is that if you look through the academic, peer reviewed literature, you will find a very clear focus on end of century outcomes, which is not necessarily in line with a decision you might want to make today. It's certainly not in line with, let's say, a 30 year mortgage on a house or large scale capital expenditures that you might be pondering. So there's a fundamental disconnect there. Another fundamental disconnect is that so much of how we think about what climate change is is very much linked to global metrics. We just think about the Paris Climate Goals. This is one and a half and two degrees warming. This is something called global mean surface temperature, which is highly, highly problematic in the sense that no one lives in a global climate, we all live in a regional climate in a zip code of sorts, you might say. And so what is missing isn't so much fundamental data per se, although there are certain aspects of Earth's climate system where we very much suffer from data limitation. But what's missing is this translation operator to take these 30,000 foot, you know, assessments of what climate change is and actually to translate those down to decision scale, which requires of course, a fair amount of scientific savvy to take a globalized metric and to turn that into something that again could, for example, help a municipal leader understand stand if they opt to site a wastewater treatment plant here or somewhere else. And several of those things which Alison mentioned as well. So a lot of this is translation, which in some sense is a roundabout way of saying that one of the most important things that we can bring to the table in terms of the climate risk analytics that we prosecute here at Woodwell, is to really engage in deep partnerships. Because this whole notion of communication is absolutely vital when we sit down with a corporate partner. Our whole idea is for this to be a sustained and deep engagement, meaning that I want to learn your language and I want you to be exposed to how I think about the world, because only then can we as an institution answer questions that you will actually be asking. So this grand translation operation is absolutely fundamental to how we actually prosecute climate risk and also what I would very much characterized as a missing ingredient when I look at this emerging marketplace of climate service providers. And that's something that we do very, very well indeed. I also wanted to briefly reflect on one thing that I think is very important to understand, and I've hinted at this somewhat, and it's this notion of the emerging marketplace, because Woodwell is very much in this emerging market, emerging marketplace. And the marketplace that I'm talking about is this almost insatiable hunger for climate intelligence. And this is relatively new. And it's actually very interesting to reflect on how this has come about. What we've seen here is nudges from various aspects of reality. One I would argue is pretty much ever since the 2019, 2020 bushfire season in Australia, which in Australia is known as Black Summer, just about every news cycle has had some link to a weather extreme. Which quickly on the heels of said weather extreme is followed up by academic, peer reviewed level science that demonstrates that said extreme is very much a product of climate change. Right? So there has been this nudge effect just based on the nightly weather report. Another thing that we have seen is actually some realization of this by the private sector themselves. For example, if we think about Larry Fink's Dear CEO, Dear CEO letters, right? And I should mention that Larry Fink is the CEO himself of a very large asset management firm. Another thing that's happened in parallel to this is various regulatory notches. We are seeing this in the European Union, we're seeing this in the People's Republic of China, and since the admin of the Biden administration, we're seeing that also here in the United States, both at the state level. One example would be the DFS in the state of New York. And of course what's happening with regards to the sec. There's this emerging regulatory framework vis a vis climate risk disclosure and ultimately something that we might think about as climate compliance. Although the end game of that is still very unclear. It's into this market that the risk work that we do is. I mean, you need to have that as a background, as a context. And I just want to emphasize two quick points on that before passing it back to Heather is that one of the reasons Woodwell is engaged is because it very much speaks to our DNA, you might say. In the opening video, you saw how the center has been around for some 35 years. Indeed, our founder was one of the first individuals ever to actually testify on Capitol Hill about what then was referred to as global warming and what we now think of as climate change. So in other words, this desire for climate insights has us playing to our strengths. Another way to think about this is that the Woods Hole Research center, now Woodwell Climate Research center, has been offering a seminar series in climate risk. We've had climate risk 101, 201, and on and on it goes. But attendance has Been quite low, you might say. But with these various nudges with this emerging market, not only do we have a full house, but we also have a wait list. And so it's very much an organic growth from where we sit as an institution to enter into this space. And that brings me to my final point, which gets back to this missing link idea, Heather, is that one of the things that we as an institution bring to the table is that through these deep engagements, and we've seen this in our actual practice to date, there comes a time where our corporate partners move away from viewing climate change as a defensive issue and they might think about more forward looking offensive opportunities to, for example, inter forest carbon markets. And it so happens that the risk group is one of five groups at the center. The other groups are absolutely instrumental in the sense that they provide the scientific expertise to allow us to engage in deep dives on a whole matter of things from the Arctic to the tropics, as well as natural climate solutions, which is something that is emerging in a lot of our engagements. So one of the missing links here really is to offer a holistic assessment as to what climate risk is. We don't want to be transactional, we don't simply want to provide maps, although the maps are foundational. But the full engagement has to go beyond that. It's this type of mindset that I would argue is still by and large absent from this, from this emerging marketplace. And it's something that we as an institution excel at. Back to you.

All right, well, I don't think I could possibly set Wende up any better than you already have, Christopher. So, Wendy, over to you. As one of our first partners in the private sector, how has this partnership transformed the way that Wellington thinks about and makes decisions around climate risk?

Thanks for the question, Heather, and congratulations to Allison and the whole team at Probable Futures. We're really excited to see this come to fruition. A little bit of background on Wellington, just so you have context. As Heather mentioned before, we are an asset manager. That means we run portfolios, we pick stocks, we pick bonds for individuals, in terms of mutual funds to help individuals retire, or for large endowments or for government institutions. So they give us their, their money, we look after it, hopefully we help it to grow and then that helps them achieve their objectives. So that's what we do. That's our goal as an organization. And back in the mid-2015, 2016, 2017 timeframe, we looked out into the marketplace and we recognized that although the asset management community, the community we're a part of was focused on climate. They were focused on a particular type of climate risk, which is transition risk. What happens if you get a carbon price? What happens if policymakers change their minds about things? What happens if you get some disruption? How will that affect the securities that we invest in? Who are the emitters? Let's not invest in them. What's the carbon footprint of our portfolio? That type of thing. And what was lacking in the marketplace was a real understanding of the science. People weren't talking about heat, drought, wildfire, hurricanes, floods, access to water issues, sea level rise, air quality, and how those physical risks were going to affect the securities that we invest in and the people we invest on behalf of. And so we created this partnership with Woodwell Climate Research center to really bridge that gap between climate science and finance. And I do tell this what I think is a cute story, it's a true story, where we sat down with Phil, the head of Woodwell, and said, we want to understand heat, drop, wildfire, hurricanes, et cetera, in basis points. And that's a term that is used every day in everyday language in finance. Just anyone in finance would use the term basis points pretty frequently. And he looked back at us and said, what's the basis point? Now, I tell that because it's emblematic of these two very analytical disciplines, really not understanding each other's language. Because if you had asked me at the time, you know, we want to understand how RCP scenarios affect basis points, I would have said, what's an RCP scenario? So literally two different languages and the two disciplines not understanding one another. So ever since that point, we started working with Woodwell to really try to bridge that gap. Understanding the various variables, understanding where, when, how, how much more frequently these influences are going to be and happen, these risks are going to happen. And then overlaying that with what we call capital markets information, which securities are going to be implicated? How, you know, how should that inform our investment decision making? How should that inform our engagement with corporations to help them build resilience? Because we all know that an economy is formed up of companies and then a society is formed of economy. So we need to build resilience at the company and issuer level in order to build resilience and adaptation at the economy and societal level. The partnership has been amazing to us and we're very grateful for Woodwell in partnering with us in this way. It's been faster and more impactful than we ever thought. We have desktop tools for our investors to help with their everyday investment decision making, but it's also been really critically foundational for other key decisions that we've made at our organization. We worked with Woodwell to create a consultation document for the companies that we meet with called Physical Risk of Climate Change Proc to really say this is how you should think about physical risk. You know, you should be disclosing this type of information. You know, can we help you? Again, trying to build resilience and adaptation. But it also led us to understand more about the transition. Because once you understand or you think you understand the physical risk of climate change, then you also recognize that the transition, the low carbon transition that's underway is going to move in one direction. It's not going to revert, and if anything, it's likely to accelerate because of the increased presence of physical climate risks in our everyday lives. If you have that as your baseline understanding, then as an investor, you recognize all of the companies and the issuers that I invest in then need a plan for this transition. They need to figure out how they're going to make their way through it or they're not going to be a good investment because they're not going to be part of the new economy. So we were founding members just this past December, again, Woodwell Partnership, foundational to this, of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, which commits to transitioning the portfolios that we manage to net zero by 2050, working with those underlying companies that we invest in to really create their own transition structures. The last thing I will mention again, Wood, while being foundational to all of this, is in order to really execute on that Net zero commitment and help the companies and investors make better choices and decisions, we recognize we need better data. We need scope one, scope two, scope three, data for the companies that we invest in so we can understand where those emissions lie. We need locational data so we can understand if they're exposed to physical climate risk. So we have. We responded to the SEC call for public comment on whether or not investors use climate data in their work. And our emphatic answer was yes. Providing multiple examples of how that work has led to better decision making in our portfolios based on the work that we've done with Woodwell.

Wow.

A lot to dig into there. But one thing I'm hearing is from you, Wendy, is perhaps a transition in thinking from climate risk information as a tool for adaptation to when you start to understand the ubiquity of climate risk and the diversity of climate risk, that it then prompts thinking about mitigation as well. And that's a theme, Helen, that I would love to turn to you with and ask as we're approaching this really critical next round of UN climate negotiations where nations are supposed to be coming back and making more ambitious pledges, and obviously we're seeing in the latest UN assessment of those climate pledges that we're not being ambitious enough to hit the marks that we've set for ourselves. How is the COP presidency thinking about climate risk as a tool for increasing ambition?

Thanks, Heather. And it's been great hearing all the different ways that Woodwell's engaging with different audiences and bringing risk information to different audiences. So then they, they raise ambition. Apologies if you can hear my dog barking in the background. I'm not sure if that's coming through, but I'm not sure who she's trying to kill outside for us. I think, to go, to take a step back, I mean, if you think about the Paris Agreement and the Paris Agreement being based on this, on the 1.5 degree target which this whole workshop series is based on, you know, that is a target to avoid dangerous climate change, you know, and to keep to 1.5 degrees or at least under 2, is to avoid the worst of climate change risks. And so I suppose that underpins everything that we do. And I think just to give the broader picture as well as presidency, this is a ratchet year for the Paris Agreement. So what would have been five years ago if it weren't for Covid? The Paris Agreement was put in place and countries signed up and made their nationally determined contributions. And this year was kind of written as a year where countries were meant to ratchet, they were meant to increase the ambition that they were putting out in their nationally determined contributions, because these are voluntary. And so our job as presidency has been to show that Paris is working, right? If Paris is working, people will make more ambitious targets that the voluntary nature of Paris is working. And so as a presidency, what we've been doing is trying to increase ambition. And so I suppose that's where this information and that's where, you know, everything that's been spoken before comes into play, is how do you allow governments to increase ambition? How do you allow governments to actually say, yeah, I'm going to meet NET 0 by 2050, and I'll come back to that target, because that involves a lot of difficult decisions and trade offs and changes in the economy and stranded assets and losses to certain sectors. And the way they can justify it is by the increasing awareness of the climate impacts that Christopher talked about, that Wendy talked about, that Alison's trying to increase because then if the public has that awareness, if business has that awareness, if everybody else is bought in, it's very easy then for the government to say, yes, I'm going to commit to that kind of target. So I think that's, that's one of the most important ways, I think at a, at a slightly more granular level, I think climate risk information, as a presidency, we tend to focus more on the positive side of climate change, on the, you know, on the benefits of a net zero transition of clean air, of good health, of, you know, better economies, of stronger energy security. But there is always that element of, but there is this to be avoided. And I think one of the most difficult things for us is walking that line between business as usual where you just think climate risks are going to increase incrementally. We did a little bit of adaptation here, a little bit of sea walls here and everything's fine, versus the kind of doom and gloom scenario where, you know, it's all over, we've got 12 years to save the planet, else we're all going to die, which then disempowers people. And so how do you walk the line between the two where you're saying it's not all over, it's not game over, but the rate at which we were going, we're going is not enough. And that comes down to kind of being able to articulate the known unknowns, you know, these tipping point, these cascading risks, or even just the temperatures that Alison showed. Right. They were, you know, they're scary looking temperatures, that this is not enough what we're doing now. So climate risk information I think has a, it's a dual edged sword, a double edged sword there for us, but I'll stop there. But, you know, happy to answer any questions.

So first of all, I want to just say thank you to everybody who's already starting to put questions into the chat and the Q and A in particular, if you would make use of that Q and A feature down at the bottom. And we will keep an eye on that and try to address a lot of your questions. And a lot of what I'm seeing already there coming out is this recognition that talking about climate risk writ large can be problematic.

Right.

What we need is hyperlocal and very specific sorts of granular information. And everybody's already highlighted that. But I wonder if maybe each of you could just give us quickly, what is one example of the risk that we face at maybe one and a half or two degrees that really stands out for you. Maybe that was really surprising when you first encountered the magnitude of the kind of risk that we are facing when we look at a world warmed by one and a half degrees. Christopher, do you want to jump in and start there?

Yeah, but I'm going to start at a somewhat more general plane. So a lot of the risk analytics, we do occur in two different currencies. There's a time denominated currency where we very much want to be actionable, which means, again, leading back to my previous comments, we don't focus on end of century, we focus on 2030, 2050. But another way to do that is also to focus on warming levels, which is very much the narrative that drives probable futures. And one of the things that I find fascinating here is that as you iterate through warming levels, so half degree, one degree, one and a half and two and so on, there's a very significant jump with just about everything going from one and a half to two degrees. In other words, there's this nonlinear step change that seems to be less than what you would see, for example, going from 0.5 to 1. That's something that I find particularly compelling when we think about the Paris climate goals, where again, for all intents and purposes, the likelihood that we will exceed one and a half is 100%. We still have some chance of not going past two. And based on, again, really looking at the risk data at these exhibits, that strikes me as obviously the best course of action. Again, my general answer is this big step change between 1 and a half and 2 degrees across all climate perils.

Allison, I know you think a lot about the different facets of climate risk and how those intersect with different people's daily lives. You showed us extreme heat, which has obvious health, labor, a whole range of personal and socioeconomic impacts. What are some of the others that really stand out to you as perhaps surprising or some of the most striking risks?

Well, I think from a big picture perspective, even at 1.5 degrees, we are going to have to work very hard to stay at one and a half degrees. We know from the science community, and it's even intuitive by looking at some of these maps, that permafrost is thawing, the Amazon is drying out, which is being further exacerbated by human activity in the Amazon. Even if we were able to achieve the human emissions reductions that we needed to get to one and a half degrees, we would still have to continually draw down carbon from the atmosphere to offset these biotic changes. That's something that really Struck me was that we don't just get to one and a half degrees and naturally stay there there. It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of maintenance. And to Christopher's point about these big step steps up to these different degrees of warming, that's going to even be more so as. As we reach those levels of warming. And then the last point is that at some point, we don't know if we'll be able to maintain stability at 2 degrees or at 2 and a half degrees or at 3 degrees. And the higher we go, the less likely it is that we would be able to actually keep that stability. I think this idea of having to maintain the climate perpetually is not something that is really well understood. Then the other thing that I would say is that if we aren't keeping it stable, then things are just constantly changing. It comes back to this idea that we built our complex society, our civilization on a stable climate, and we will not have that anymore. There is no normal anymore. It is going to keep changing each and every year and each and every decade.

Well, so I'll just pause for a second and say that's our second event in this series. We'll be digging into tipping points and commitment points and feedback loops. So be sure to come back and join us in two weeks for a deep dive into those issues. Coming back a little bit to this question of risk and how that can risk understanding and how that can motivate. Helen, as the COP presidency is trying to build ambition, you're kind of across the board. But to say across the board, you're dealing with just a huge range of different risks that different countries face, different abilities to adapt or respond to those risks to mitigate climate change as a whole. How do you navigate all of those kind of differences? And are there particular risks or points that are maybe commonalities or particular that have seemed to be particularly effective in kind of grabbing people and saying, yeah, this is okay. I now get it why we need to be so much more ambitious.

It's a very good question. It doesn't really have an easy answer because I think actually based on some of the questions coming through, if you think about it, we're talking about future risks and we're talking about future problems. I think it was Larry Kane's question, actually. A lot of people are feeling the impacts of climate change now. And, you know, and they have been for a long time. There's been an adaptation gap for a very long time. And, you know, because of inequality and underdevelopment and different, you know, different rates of kind of development. And we won't get into the reasons why. But so, you know, baked into the UNFCCC is this idea of common but differentiated responsibility. And there's an awful lot of. If you think about successful, negotiated outcomes are very difficult because you have half the world that's not contributed to climate change but is experiencing the worst of them already. And then you have the other half which knows it's going to get really bad, but it isn't quite now, so there's no motivation to change. And I think that question of what does make people change is a difficult one because we always think we're going to meet the one thing that does. You know, it was interesting hearing David talk about the wildfires. Was that enough to make a shift in public? You know, because things like Hurricane Katrina perhaps weren't. So I think for us, it is about acknowledging differential responsibility and acknowledging that countries are already experiencing and the term is loss and damage. So impacts of climate change that destroy part of something that you care about, that you can't adapt against. Sometimes you might have been able to adapt against it if you had the money. Sometimes you can't replace things. So when you ask that question about what comes to mind, the loss at 1.5 degrees, I mainly came to cultural factors. You know, species of tree or glaciers being lost or, you know, burial grounds falling into the sea. They were the things that really sprung to mind as being valuable that would be lost. So I think it's about acknowledging that there's already countries facing these losses and how do we incorporate equity and justice into everything we do, you know, which is difficult. That's why nothing moves forward often.

Wendy, I want to give you a bite at this apple. And are there particular risks or aspects to climate risk? You already talked about the power of really realizing the ubiquity of risk and how that shifted your thinking. But are there particular aspects of climate risk that have been really impactful for you and your colleagues?

Yes. And I think I'm going to bring this to a more granular level to explain how that's worked, because, Heather, you were advertising the next sessions on tipping points. We've actually had a few sessions on tipping points already, which can be incredibly distressing. Right. It can feel a little bit hopeless, but it also can be compelling. Once you understand that within an investable time frame, which is the charge that we have, that you will realize physical climate risk in the securities that you own on behalf of clients, then you recognize that there's something that you're doing on a day to day basis that can help to change that trajectory, which is within your remit as an investor. You're meant to be looking after these people's retirement accounts. You're not doing your job well if you're not engaging in this topic. And so in order to do that, you know, we really have to understand where those risks are going to unfurl and implicate various securities and help to price those risks more accurately. And if you start to get capital markets, if you start to get capital markets, stock markets, bond markets, actually pricing the risk risks, that will change behavior. You can also use that capital, you can redirect capital to companies that are providing solutions, or companies who are building more resilience into their own activities, or companies who are making the transition and who will help be part of the low carbon economy. And so it can be daunting and distressing, or it can be compelling and empowering to understand within this decade, within the next decade, what's going to happen with regard to physical climate risks as we're working on mitigation. At the same time.

I want to come back to something that Helen said and that was about infusing equity and justice into all of this. Because Allison, you showed us a map that showed huge variation in the number of 90 or 95 degree days over the southwest of the United States. Then you showed us also those global.

Maps where it's very clear there's huge.

Variation and in particular, it's the Global south that's going to see that largest increase in extreme heat. And that's often the case across a number of climate risks.

Right.

So there are differences, there are disparities in the level of risk. So what do we do with that understanding? How do we take that understanding of those disparities and start to turn that into something that is more equitable and just in terms of the solutions or the strategies that we pursue.

That to me, okay, I mean, the first thing that I would say is that we do need to equip those communities with information so they can know what's coming and plan for it and advocate for themselves. So, you know, climate justice and equity has really been central in the motivation to develop the Probable Futures platform. It's why we built this platform that makes it, this data accessible and transparent for everyone. Because even though climate scientists have built this wealth of information over the past 40 years, it just hasn't been translated in a way that communities can really actionably use it. So we believe that Everyone deserves the ability to know what's coming. And the people who are the most vulnerable likely have the least access to data like this in these risk assessments. So we hope that the platform will support kind of movements that are already working on this and you know, we're there to help and support in any way.

Christopher, the your risk team has over the past year begun working with a relatively small number just because of the size of your team of under resourced communities across the United States, diving deep into particular aspects of their risk. And the question that comes to mind is how do we scale this? I mean, for all of the information that Probable Futures can provide on its.

Website.

It'S not necessarily a tailored risk assessment for a city. There's only so many of those cities or towns, Christopher, that your team can work with. How do we actually get the level of risk knowledge that we need? And this is coming out in the questions and in the chat as well, right? Is people have very specific, very granular questions for their community, for their home, for their decision making, for their investments. Of course, is there a path to actually creating and you know, and having enough information available to address this?

Well, so I think in some sense, Heather, you have just advocated for what I'll loosely call a international climate service. So if we kind of borrow the parlance and mindset of a land grant university in the United States, they tend to have extension components. Right. And the idea of the municipal climate assessments is perhaps a good way to think about this that the risk group is currently prosecuting, is it? As you have indicated, it's very difficult to scale. The center itself has about 100 people, the risk group has about 12 people. Doing these types of municipal climate assessments the right way requires deep engagement. In other words, this is very much co production of knowledge. It doesn't work for us to simply show up to drop a nice glossy PDF on someone's desk and declare mission accomplished. That doesn't really move the needle at all. It requires a sustained engagement. And if we think about the actors who are are able to marshal the level of resources that would be required to sustain these types of engagement, not just for a handful of cities with whom we have, for example, worked both in the United States as well as in the Global south, it really does, I think, speak to the need for some government mandated framework, or at least government funded framework to engage in this space, such that the types of municipal climate assessments that again, any municipality really ought to have is something that can indeed be real. We have a pipeline in existence already to generate these international climate assessments that of course is associated with the IPCC and several, if not all OECD countries have with some degree of regularity, national climate assessments. But doing this at the municipal level would very much be a quantum leap that would indeed require a quantum leap in the amount of resources allocated to prosecute these types of, to prosecute these types of risk assessments.

Wendy, I wonder, what role do you see for the private sector in integrating climate risk and this really granular understanding of climate risk into decision making? Is there any kind of broader role? You talked about the comment to the SEC that Wellington submitted in favor of mandating climate risk disclosure and in conjunction with Woodwell, calling for those disclosures to be rigorous and standardized and publicly accessible. I mean, this is creating more information, in a sense, at least for investors, right?

Absolutely. And while that may sound mundane, I think it could be incredibly powerful. So the SEC is the chief regulatory body for investors like ourselves who are based in the US or anyone who wants to list their securities in the US and what's happening now is when we look at information on companies or issuers, there actually isn't a lot of recognition of climate change in the data that you get. You get things about free cash flow or sales or revenues, expenses, that type of data. You don't actually get location data and you don't actually get emissions data for those companies. And how are these companies, if you accept that we are transitioning to a low carbon future? How are those companies going to be prepared for that low carbon future if they're not even measuring what their emissions profile is today? How are investors going to know who to fund who, not to fund who, to ask questions of who's in an okay position if we don't have the information. And I think that this is the first step to actually getting real movement from capital markets along this front, is to get that information out into the public domain so that you can be making those choices. And I saw in the chat or in the Q and A, someone said capitalism can't solve this. We need policymakers. I think we need both, right? I think, I think we need everybody all in figuring out what your domain is, where you can have impact and utilizing that impact in order to help, you know, with this transition, help solve this problem, help raise awareness, help create resilience, help look for adaptation solutions, et cetera. So maybe not capitalism alone, I agree, but I think capitalism can be a part of it.

We've got just a few minutes before the top of the hour and I do want to Let folks know that all of our panelists have agreed to stick around until 4:15, anticipating that we would have a lot of questions and there's obviously a lot more ground that we could cover. But I know that a lot of people are going to need to take off at 4 o'.

Clock.

And so I would just quickly, maybe a minute, minute and a half from each of you. We've told people that we're committed to 1.5, we're on track for 2.7. There are enormous changes that take place between 1.5 and two potentially tipping points and feedback loops that we set off and that we don't have enough really information about the risks that we face at the granularity, or enough people don't have access to all of the information that we have about climate risk to fully adapt and to motivate the mitigation we need. It doesn't sound like a great news story, and yet I know that all of you, and I see Wendy smiling. I know that all of you see this understanding and this information as a tool not to overwhelm people with fear, but to actually inspire and motivate. So someone actually asked earlier, is there a chance for a better future? Where do you see that? And where do you see the possibility of positivity in this risk, Understanding of risk? Allison, go ahead.

You unmuted.

Go ahead. Yeah, I'm happy to. And I saw that question in the chat as well. I think there's something really beautiful that can come from acceptance, first of all, of where we are, because acceptance means that we understand where we are and we start to look forward. Do I believe that there's a possibility that the future is good? Absolutely, I believe that. And I think recognizing the reality of climate change and how we need to change the way that we live in order to address it, that is where the good future comes in. We have an incredible opportunity in front of us to transform and reorganize many aspects of our society. To me, that sounds really exciting because there are definitely things that we can improve. There are different lives that we can live that may be more fulfilling, that may be healthier. A lot of even the personal changes that we make when we start to reduce our carbon footprints or address climate change are actually really healthy and beneficial. I think of the way that we talk about climate risk here as hopeful realism. It's accepting the things that we can't change, but saying, okay, let's understand what we can change and let's make the absolute best of it.

Helen, you already said that the COP26 presidency likes to focus on those. The positive aspects of the change that we need. Yeah. So talk to me about how you reconcile understanding the risks that we're already seeing. I mean, the wildflower fires, the floods, the heat waves, the droughts that we're already seeing, the risks that we know we face, and this idea that that can actually be empowering.

Thanks. And I think there's two points I think that I'd like to make. I think there's more than two points. The first builds on Alison's, which is that if you think about it, a lot of the reason why we suffer because of climate change impacts isn't because of the hazard. It isn't the flood, it isn't the heat, it's the social conditions that people are living in. And so through development processes, through normal economic development and increasing equity, you can actually just take away a lot of the risk. The hazard remains, but whether that hazard leads to destroying someone's life is up to us. And I think that's the first point, and that's what Alison was kind of referring to, I think are one of the elements. I think the second thing is don't talk enough about social tipping points. We talk about physical tipping points, or you're going to in two weeks. But there is a potential for society to change very rapidly. And it has changed very rapidly in the past. And one of the things that I'm really proud of, the presidency and what it's doing is it picked the three most emitting sectors and it responded to the 1.5 degree report that came out of the IPCC, picked three of the most emitting sectors. So energy, specifically coal, transport, specifically private transport, cars and land use change, so deforestation. And it took those three challenges and it said, how can we create the conditions where a social tipping point would happen, where things could flip into another way of being that we don't burn coal or we don't chop down forests. And they basically got the countries that are involved. And the problem with the UNFCCC is it's so slow. Like, you know, talking about Paris, you're talking about the whole world, but not the whole world is destroying the rainforest. Right. You've got to talk to Indonesia, you've got to talk to Ghana, you've got to talk to Brazil. And so what the presidency did was use its convening power to bring those countries together to say, okay, how can we move this forward? The same with coal. We brought together all the, the big coal producing and coal funding and coal burning countries and said, how can we just get rid of coal? Coal's got to go. How do we get. And you're seeing shifts. I saw it on Twitter that China had agreed to stop funding coal overseas. I couldn't verify it, but I saw on Twitter today if that's happened, that's a big tipping point. China is the biggest funder of coal overseas. So for me, it's about creating the conditions where you have very social tipping point can happen where so many people believe something's possible that it becomes possible. And that's not. That's not a dream. That is about bringing the key players together in coalitions of the willing or the unwilling, but smaller coalitions to really change the landscape so that things become possible.

Wendy, how about you? Well, where does the positive.

Well, I would say where does the.

Positivity and determination in this come from for you? Sure.

Well, I think, you know, in my little. In my little microcosm, what I see is tremendous change and an acceleration of that change. I believe that we're seeing a paradigm shift, a transformation of capital markets and how they behave and how they try to invest and make decisions. And so. And that's happened over the last three years. So we can change and we can make progress. And we've made some progress already, but that progress is accelerating as more people become more informed, more educated. You've got a very, you know, analytical group in this finance community that's ready to utilize data to make better decisions and to provide capital to solutions and avoid giving capital to problems. And I think that that can be a part of the solution. So that can be really hopeful. It's not the entire part. We need. We need the Helens of the world. We need the Allisons of the world. We need the Heathers of the world. We need everyone who's dialed into this to ask questions in their local communities of how their communities are addressing physical climate risk. Or if you're at a company, you know, you can ask your company's leaders in your retirement plan how, you know, how is it being addressed or in your everyday decision making, how is it being addressed? If your children are at a school, you can ask that school, you know, in their own planning how they've addressed it. So there's a lot of different places where individuals can have influence that can create this increased awareness. And now there's more and more information and I believe more and more receptivity, even though it feels sometimes that this topic can be politicized. We've moved from pure climate denial among A subset to the acceptance of the fact that the climate is changing because they see, everyone sees the climate change in front of them. And that has been something that we've seen in the last two years as well. So with more information, knowledge is power, you can make better choices. We can get the capital markets working to help us with that, and we can get policymakers to come along, and that is a more hopeful future.

Christopher, we actually, when this group met earlier this week, you, you made a statement about the essentially inevitability of hitting 1.5 degrees C. That kind of tip this off. Because everyone's response was, well, that sounds incredibly negative. And you said, no, no, I actually see this as incredibly motivating and that a reason to work harder and do more. So how do you, in looking at this risk data every single day, where do you find that motivating factor?

Yeah, so I will admit that at times it's very difficult to find the motivating factor. It's very easy to be consumed by doom and gloom as you look at some of these exhibits of the various climate perils. And then you superimpose on top of that, how willfully underprepared we as a civilization are to deal with some of these frontier risks. The optimism stems from the following, however, is that while 1 1/2 degrees may be locked in, we have a puncture's chance of avoiding 2 degrees, and we really ought to act on that because fundamentally the level of warming is very much a choice variable. It's something that we control. A perhaps somewhat simplistic way to view this is that humanity caused climate change, which means we can quote, unquote uncause climate change. We can actually fix it. And so we have these kind of three broad conceptual levers that I like to think about. There's a certain level of adaptation, a certain level of mitigation, and a certain level of suffering that is going to be part and parcel of how we deal with with climate change. But all those are things that we control. And the extent to which that we push one of these knobs in one direction versus another, and how that's geographically distributed and how it's just distributed across all manner of space, both time and nation, state versus locality, versus these various kind of divisions that we have in society across gradients of weight, wealth and so on, how we do that, in some sense gives us the engineering tools to very much create a better future. And so that's where I draw the optimism from. In some sense, we don't want to let this Quote, unquote crisis go to waste. We do indeed have a certain amount of foresight. I think to create a better future, we simply need to act on it.

With the last few minutes we have, I mean, we've talked about these essentially large initiatives, right? The scales that Woodwell and Woodwell's partners are working on to drive change. And in the Q and A and the chat, are questions popping up constantly. You know, should I be investing in funds that have made net zero pledges, or is that a waste of time? How can I get my local leaders to better understand climate risk? Again, these very granular what can I do? Sorts of questions. I would love to go to each of you for one final action item that folks can take away from this conversation today. What is one thing that they can do with their investments? Engaging local community leaders, getting involved. How can they help be part of this large systemic change and incorporation of climate risk that we really need? Wendy, do you want to kick us off there?

Sure. Well, you know, I think everyone has a role to play here. And so I think thinking about your own personal situation and what your potential levers may be can help you calibrate. So when we thought about that from an asset management perspective, we thought about, okay, what can we do? Well, we can learn more. We can partner with a climate science organization. We can help to price risks through our investments. Then our clients, who would be folks like you or large institutions, said to us, actually, we see that you're pricing these risks in the existing portfolios that you manage, but how can we get more direct access to climate solutions? And so we've now created a climate platform. I'm not trying to tell you what climate platform, but we've created a climate platform of different types of portfolios that then invest in climate solutions. And then we went beyond that, right? We said, okay, what else should we be doing? Well, we should be making a net zero commitment as a firm and engaging with companies that we invest in to get them to create transition plans. What do they need to create transition plans? Well, they need to assess their own data. What do we need? We need to be able to assess the data. So what does that mean? We'll engage with the SEC and see if we can get that data mandated across the board. So we really started to, like, you know, create larger and larger circles of what, what was in, within our control as investors. So if you think about that as it translates to your own lives, it may be, okay, I sit on the school board, and so therefore I should be raising this issue about education in schools. I should be raising this issue about education for teachers. I should be raising this issue, the locations of our schools and whether or not they're adequately resourced or resilient to changes in climate risk or everyone pays taxes. So you have access to municipal leaders, and I should start asking my municipal leaders about what we're doing about the physical risks of climate change. Maybe you can use Allison's probable futures tool to highlight their own awareness, because there is a dearth of knowledge of the science, the actual science, and that it's within what we call an investable time frame because we're investors. When we started on this work, people thought it was too far away to matter. It's not. It's here now. And you can be part of increasing that awareness and helping others make those decisions.

Allison, do you want to jump in there? Because that sounds very similar to things I've heard you say in the run up to the launch about probable futures, about helping people understand their sphere of influence and how they can put this information into action.

Yeah, I totally agree with what Wendy said. Everyone has a role to play here. And you need to examine your areas of influence, whatever those are, if it's your family, if it's your community, or if it's your business or industry. The thing that I would add, I've been in the space for a little while, worked at Woodwell, and we get this question all the time. What is the one thing that we can do? I think first of all, we need to recognize that there is no one thing. This is, as I was saying earlier, a total transformation of how we live. So I think the first thing, the first step towards that, like that can feel really big, right? And it is. But the first step towards that is just really incorporating climate awareness into your everyday life. And that can take different forms. I mean, that can take the form of being really mindful of your carbon footprint and making those choices accordingly. But it's more than that too, I think. I think it even includes just paying attention to how the climate underpins every aspect of our lives, paying attention to all the different assumptions that we've made in our life about a stable climate. And one of the most important things I think is talking really openly and honestly about climate change with friends, with family, with your children. That is living a climate aware life.

Helen, the UN process for setting these goals and national level action can seem very distant from most people. Is there a role for individuals in that, or is it a different process that individuals should be engaged in?

I think it's very frustrating speed at which both processes work. I think the action that individuals want based on what we're seeing versus the kind of machinations and the mechanisms that work within this UN process, that they move at different rates. Right. So I think it's incredibly frustrating when we look at the UNFCCC because it's so slow, which is why the UNFCCC itself had to. Had to transform. And so it realized that it had to engage other actors, it had to engage business, it had to engage civil society, NGOs and youth, because they were the actors that could move at an appropriate speed. I think I agree, really, with everything Wendy said about, you know, everything that you, every part of your life where you have a little bit of power, a little bit of decision, a little bit of agency, you know, make that, make the climate choice there, I think, and encourage others to have to do it, where you have a little bit of, of control. I mean, in anything. And I agree and agree with Alison on conversations, you can't hold back. I mean, it's, you really just have to keep talking to people in a kind and open way about this. I think the final thing I would add is that governments do listen to the people that are in their constituencies, and I think in two ways. One, keep applying pressure to any form of government person that you have access to, whether it's your local councillor or your city mayor or your pm. And I don't know in the us but in the uk, you know, we have to answer everybody, piece of mail that comes to us. So, you know, we do read the letters and we do have to respond. So keep applying that pressure. And I think that's, you know, that's, you know, we have to keep showing that this is something that we want.

So I'd say that, Christopher, we're pretty much at time here, but anything else to add on the what can I do front?

Well, I was going to go with the last point that Helen had just mentioned. This idea of political pressure, particularly in the U.S. context, where we know there is a significant contrast between the current and the previous administration and that links to a political philosophy. And in some sense, you have to not only become an informed citizen and where you have agency to act on that, that, but you also have to simply put, vote accordingly. That's how ultimately pressure is applied. And particularly in the United States with its highly divided polities, that's a very tall order. But that is indeed something that we ought to be very cognizant of. Again, to use Helen's words to apply this pressure that is simply, it's absolutely paramount that we continue to do that. I'll leave it at that.

Yeah. On that note, I want to thank everybody who has come today to our discussion and thank all of our panelists for your wonderful perspectives and all of the chat that has been going back and forth, additional information and questions. It's really been wonderful. And one of the last questions, although there's been a couple flurry here in the very last few moments, was should we be calling this a climate emergency instead of climate change? I just wanted to share one perspective on that, which is first of all, well over 10,000 scientists have signed on to a peer reviewed paper saying, yes, this is an emergency. One of the authors of that paper, that assessment, the first time it came out a couple of years ago, when I said, why emergency? He said, an emergency is a life threatening situation that requires urgent action. It's actionable. If there's nothing we can do, it's just a tragedy. And that has really stuck with me that we are in a climate emergency. It is actionable. If I can get my screen sharing up here, I'm going to leave you with one very small action that you can take which I think is very much in line with what we heard from Allison and from Wendy and even from Helen. This idea of constantly learning more and then having conversations and sharing that information. Woodwell is constantly pushing the boundaries of what we know and how we're responding to this crisis. We'd love it if you would sign up for our email updates and information on future events and, and share that with your networks as well. I know at least a couple of people we know shared news of this event with some of their local officials, which is fabulous and we thank you for that. So maybe that's one thing also that you can take with you. You've heard the old shampoo, wash, rinse, repeat. I have my own version. Learn, share, repeat. So keep learning, keep sharing, keep talking about it and applying pressure and hopefully we will see you back here in two weeks for our discussion of tipping points and feedback loops. So thank you very much everyone.