Bank of England consults on its proposals for stress testing the financial stability implications of climate change
19 December 2019
The objective of the the 2021 Biennial Exploratory Scenario is to test the resilience of the largest banks and insurers to the physical and transition risks associated with different possible climate scenarios, and the financial system’s exposure more broadly to climate-related risk.
Whilst climate-related risks will materialise over decades, actions today will affect the size of those future risks. It is therefore important that firms, and other stakeholders such as the Bank, continue to develop innovative approaches to measure climate-related risks before it is too late to ensure resilience to them. The BES will use exploratory scenarios to size these future risks and to explore how firms might respond to them materialising, rather than testing firms’ capital adequacy.
The key features of the BES are:
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Multiple Scenarios that cover climate as well as macro-variables: to test the resilience of the UK’s financial system against the physical and transition risks in three distinct climate scenarios. These range from taking early, late and no additional policy action to meet global climate goals.
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Broader participation: both banks and insurers are exposed to climate-related risks, and the action of one will spill over to affect the other. For insurers, this exercise builds on the scenarios developed for this year’s insurance stress test.
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Longer time horizon: is needed as climate-related risks crystallise over a much longer timeframe than conventional risks. The BES proposes a modelling horizon of 30 years.
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Counterparty-level modelling: a bottom up, granular analysis of counterparties’ business models split by geographies and sectors is proposed to accurately capture the exposure to climate-related risks.
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Output: the Bank will disclose aggregate results of the financial sector’s resilience to climate-related risk rather than individual firms.
The Bank is consulting on the design of the exercise and welcomes feedback by 18 March 2020. The final BES framework will be published in the second half of 2020 and the results of the exercise will be published in 2021.
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