Network for Greening the Financial System

In its first comprehensive report published in April 2019, the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) has outlined a scenario framework for central banks and supervisors. As a novel element, this framework combines climate change transition risks and physical risks in one common framework. So far, however, this framework is not yet filled with available, well documented and consistent scenarios.

This is the gap that the project sets out to fill, in a two-tier approach, with (i) a first set of climate change scenarios based on existing scenarios that aims to allow for rapid uptake and use, and (ii) the setting up of a longer-term process that will enable more consistent and tailor-made scenario frameworks to allow for full implementation of the envisioned stress testing and risk assessments. The objective is to establish the public good of an open platform for climate change scenario information to be used in climate-related financial risk analysis.

The first-tier scenarios are available in the NGFS Scenario Explorer, which is IIASA's web-based user interface for transition scenario results. The explorer provides intuitive visualizations & display of timeseries data and the option to download the data in multiple formats.

This Scenario Explorer hosts the NGFS scenarios, which were produced by NGFS Workstream 2 in partnership with an academic consortium from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), University of Maryland (UMD), Climate Analytics (CA) and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH). This work was made possible by grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies and ClimateWorks Foundation.​

The scenarios are generated by state-of-the-art well-established integrated assessment models (IAMs), namely GCAM (UMD), MESSAGE-GLOBIOM (IIASA) and REMIND-MAgPIE (PIK). These models allow the estimation of global and regional mitigation costs, the analysis of energy system transition characteristics, the quantification of investments required to transform the energy system, and the identification of synergies and trade-off of sustainable development pathways. Technical documentation is available to help users access the datasets. The documentation describes the models and variables, as well as provides detailed guidance for database users. Scenario presentation materials and the user guide are also available at the NGFS publications page.

As appreciation towards the team working on this project 1/4 Acre of woodland has been dedicated in grove four at Dering Wood.

Last edited: 19 August 2020