On September 10 2020, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and PwC held a Webinar on the GIP Climate & Environmental Risk Assessment Toolbox (CERAT). SinoCarbon, the technical developer, presented a demo to instruct the audience on the usage of the CERAT and Ben PEEL from Carbon Trust was also invited as a guest speaker to present a recent report on preparing the Chinese financial markets for climate transition risks. Over 50 representatives from almost all GIP members attended the webinar.

Working Group 1 (WG1) has been working on the risk assessment toolbox for signatories, including an online tool to assess carbon emission at the project level in order to better inform early-stage investment and business decisions. During the demo session, three main features of the CERAT were presented:

● The online toolbox is available in both Chinese and English and a bilingual user manual can be downloaded upon log-in.

● The toolbox can measure the carbon emission of both green and carbon intensive projects and provides benchmarking against Chinese and EU standards.

● A report will be automatically generated for users. Project information will not be stored in the system to avoid confidentiality concerns.

Feedback from a handful of institutions who have already tried out the toolbox was positive. Most of them found it useful and expressed their expectation for the incorporation of more aspects of environmental and climate risk assessment into the current system, which has been scheduled into WG1’s 2020-2021 business plan.

Ben PEEL from Carbon Trust also shared the findings of a recent report, “How to Deal with the Green Swan: How Chinese financial markets prepare for dealing with the climate transition risk”. He noted that, at policy level, climate is recognised as a systemic risk, often covered as a subset of environmental risk, and policymakers have made limited commitments to act. At the institutional level, meanwhile, most Chinese financial institutions’ awareness of climate related risks is at an early stage and the internal motivation to act is insufficient. In addition, most of the internationally developed tools have not been used in China. Some pioneers have made progress in developing China specific tools, however, such as CliTRAM. Nonetheless, high-quality public climate related data is not available.

The webinar concluded that climate and environmental risk assessment will be a long journey and challenges regarding data availability and institutional capacity persist. WG1 is dedicated to developing useful toolkits for all GIP members in this regard and welcomes suggestions from members on how it can better assist.