Klimaresearch: Armut und Migration
Viele Klimawandelverlierer: Who are the victims of low-carbon transitions? Towards a political ecology of climate change mitigation (#41 Downloads) von Benjami Sovacool vom März 2021: “Low-carbon transitions and climate mitigation efforts can be viewed as power struggles and processes of exacerbating vulnerability. This review of 20 years of political ecology literature has confirmed the persistent presence of four processes—enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment—across technologies as diverse as wind energy, hydroelectric, electric vehicles, household solar panels, building retrofits, climate smart agriculture, land use management, and forestry. Across all of these diverse technical (S. 36) configurations (centralized and decentralized, supply-side and demand-side), contexts (energy markets, political economies, distinct cultures), and countries (Africa to Asia, Europe to North America), climate mitigation creates a fulcrum for elitism, discrimination and the consolidation of wealth. … The evidence identified no less than 61 different vulnerable groups of indigenous peoples, aboriginal collectives, or ethnic minorities negatively impacted by climate efforts, some of them under threat via multiple processes or mitigation options at once. Moreover, the impacts differentially cut across: scales (spanning local-community divides or urban-rural locations or even implicating global actors such as unions, financers, or investors); temporality (present vs. future generations); and recognition (affecting very specific and highly vulnerable groups including child prostitutes, slaves, smallholder farmers, coastal property owners, etc.). … Sixty-two cases of climate mitigation resulted in violence, including severe violence, murder, and torture. Others resulted in the threat of irreversible species loss, the degradation of cultural icons, or the permanent alteration of ecosystems and landscapes” (S. 37).
Besonders hohes Klimarisiko für Arme: The Distributional Effects of Climate Change: Evidence from Iran (#27) von Naser Amanzadeh, Toshi H. Arimura, Mohammad Vesal und Seyed Farshad Fatemi Ardestani vom 14. Mai 2021: “we use 21 years of household-level data from a middle-income country, Iran, to study the distributional impact of climate change. Our preferred estimates show that a one-degree Celsius increase in annual temperature leads to an 8.1 percent decrease in per capita expenditure for rural households. Additionally, a 100 mm increase in annual precipitation results in a 1.5 percent increase in per capita expenditure for rural households. We also find a significant impact of extremely hot days in rural areas … We find a much stronger impact of temperature variation on the poor deciles in rural and urban areas” (S. 29/30).
Klimamigration: Changing Tides: Public Attitudes on Climate Migration (#53) von Sabrina B. Arias und Christopher W. Blair vom 4. April 2021: “Using a conjoint experiment fielded on nationally representative samples in the U.S. and Germany, we find that internal and international climate migrants occupy a distinct, intermediate place in the public view. Individuals are more supportive of settling climate migrants than economic migrants, but less supportive of settling climate migrants than refugees. … a second experiment shows that priming climate migration is unlikely to catalyze support for climate change mitigation. Rather, dispositions like empathy drive concern about climate migration and climate change mitigation. These findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that mass attitudes on migration are affected by migrants’ different reasons for migrating” (S. 9).
Klimaresearch und Ökonomie
Luxemburger Klimarisiko: Heterogeneous effects of temperature and emissions on economic productivity across climate regimes (#6) von Cosimo Magazzino, Mihai Mutascu, Samuel Asumadu Sarkodie, Festus Fatai Adedoyin und Phebe Asantewaa Owusu vom 10. März 2021: “The strong positive relationship between income and emissions indicates that carbon intensity through fossils underpins wealth creation and vice versa. … the strong negative effect of temperature on income productivity across countries has policy implications. … While a swing in temperature from extreme cold to temperate may favor wealth creation in Norway, the opposite may occur in temperate and tropical regions like Luxembourg, Kuwait, and Singapore. Such scenario of extreme temperature levels affects energy requirements through heating and cooling degree days––thus, escalating energy consumption cum emissions” (S. 9).
Klimarisiko reduziert Innovationen: Climate vulnerability and corporate innovation: International evidence (#118) von Fengfei Li, Chen Lin und Tse-Chun Lin vom 1. März 2021: “We provide novel evidence that the vulnerability to climate change adversely affects firms’ R&D investment and innovation performance across the world based on a sample of 60,028 firms from 88 countries during the period 1995-2019. … The effect exists not only in developing countries but also in developed ones. Moreover, we find that climate vulnerability increases the ratio of patents on climate change mitigation technologies in new innovations and triggers more exploitative innovations” (S. 30).
Müssen Unternehmen anders bilanzieren? Werte nachhaltig bilanzieren – für eine zukunftsfähige Ökonomie (kostenpflichtig) von Rainer Monnet von 2021: Zu den gesetzlichen Grundsätzen ordnungmässiger Buchführung und Bilanzierung wie Bilanzwahrheit und Bilanzklarheit, heißt es auf Seite 159: „Gewerbliche Unternehmen externalisieren Kosten, zum Beispiel für Umwelt und ökologische Folgen. Und so widersprechen diese den Grundsätzen der Nachhaltigkeit (Vollständigkeit und Richtigkeit)“. Online kann man sehen, wie die Wertebilanzierung aussehen könnte vgl. Musterbilanz – Wertebilanz.com
Klimakiller Cannabis: Hotboxing the Polar Bear: The Energy and Climate Impacts of Indoor Marijuana Cultivation (#31) von Gina Warren vom 5. April 2021: “Indoor marijuana cultivation is currently legal –at least a some level– in all but eight states in the United States. … Indoor marijuana cultivation has an energy demand that rivals data centers. With energy intensities around 2,000 Watts per minute, it consumes between 50 and 200 times more than an average office building and 66 times more than an average home. And, given the lucrative nature of the industry and the movement toward legalization, its energy demand is projected to grow exponentially over the next several years” (abstract).
Im Energiebereich ist noch sehr viel zu tun: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector von der International Energy Agency vom 12. Mai 2021: “There has been a rapid increase over the last year in the number of governments pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero. Net zero pledges to date cover around 70% of global GDP and CO2 emissions. However, fewer than a quarter of announced net zero pledges are fixed in domestic legislation and few are yet underpinned by specific measures or policies to deliver them in full and on time” (S. 29).
Kritisches fossiles Lobbying: The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Push to Target Climate Protesters in the U.S. (#129) von Grace Nosek vom 3. Februar 2021: “… governments around the world are targeting protesters advocating for climate action. … The rhetorical push by government lawmakers and fossil fuel industry stakeholders to cast protesters as terrorists and extremists has eased the passage of critical infrastructure provisions imposing draconian penalties on violators, which in turn have made it easier for lawmakers to surveil and arrest protesters. … pivotal role of fossil fuel industry trade and lobbying groups in creating, supporting, and amplifying various tactics to target climate protesters. … Fossil fuel trade and lobbying groups, like the American Petroleum Institute, also serve as a key link between the push to stifle climate protesters and the drive to undermine climate science for decades” (S. 53-56).
Schlechte Energiesparvorbilder: What make people more likely to take personal action for climate mitigation? Taking the case of energy consumption in Europe (#16) von Sophie Lavaud vom 18. Februar 2021: “This paper contributes to the understanding of public behaviours when it comes to energy consumption reduction likelihood. It showed that political support, energy affordability and climate concern were factors explaining such behaviours and can be fruitfully leveraged by politicians. However, … knowing that others will reduce their energy consumption provides reason not to change.”
Klimareseach und Nachhaltige Investments
Wissenschaftliche Methodenkritik: How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates? (#4430) Von Andrew Baker, David Larcker und Charles Wang vom ….: “The estimation of policy effects—either the average effect or the average effect on the treated—is at the core of empirical finance, accounting, and legal studies. A workhorse methodological approach in this literature uses the passage of laws or market rules impacting one set of firms or market participants (treated) but not others (controls). This is typically done by comparing the differences in the outcomes between treated and control units after the implementation of a law with the differences in the outcomes between treatment and control units before the law. This methodological approach, called difference-in-differences (DiD), is common in applied microeconomic research, and has been used across policy domains to test the impact of broadly applied policies. A generalized version of this estimation approach that relies on the staggered adoption of laws or regulations (e.g., across states or across countries) has become especially popular over the last two decades” (S. 1). “… recent advances in econometric theory show that such designs are likely to be biased … We apply recently proposed methods to a set of prior published results, and find that correcting for the bias … frequently impacts the estimated effect from standard difference-indifference studies. In many cases, the reported effects in prior research become indistinguishable from zero” (abstract).
SRI Theorie: Socially Responsible Investment versus Socially Responsible Consumption (#68) von Hendrik Hakenes und Eva Schliephake vom 18. Mai 2021: “In an economy, investment, production and consumption decisions are intertwined and should therefore not be studied separately. We therefore raise the question whether it makes sense at all to worry about ethics when investing money. Alternatively, households could focus on more sustainable consumption, and worry less when investing. … To achieve a targeted impact, households need to decide on how much to care, but not about what to care more (Proposition 1). … We show that their utility is reduced the least when they choose to focus one either consumption or investment. Which path is more efficient to reach a certain level of impact sustainable decisions are undone by standard (rational) households on the aggregate level. For example, if responsible households buy less nuclear electricity, then the price of nuclear electricity may drop, and standard households may increase the fraction of nuclear energy in their energy mix. The same is true for capital markets. If responsible households refrain from buying shares of some evil firm, then these shares drop in price and become attractive for standard investors (S. 27). …We show that there is always a corner solution making one path less efficient than the other. For a responsible household, this implies that to maximize his utility given a targeted impact they should either focus on consumption or on investment depending on the market risk and product preferences“ (S. 28).
Engagement ist ineffizient: Maximising Investor Impact – An Analysis of Climate Engagement in the Utility Sector von Universal Owner vom April 2021: “Investors tend to have the most impact when they push companies to make material changes to their business models and reform their political lobbying. Yet these are not the typical asks of most of the world’s leading institutional investors, which concentrate on climate risk and disclosure, which has produced few observable impacts. …Asks for net-zero targets have met with broad success. But this average conceals a wide variation in both the quality of the targets adopted and companies’ steps to fulfil them. Utilities often adopt netzero targets covering only Scope 1 emissions and can defer emissions reductions because they do not adopt accompanying mid-term targets. When they do adopt mid-term targets, they are often underambitious: setting them on a rate of decarbonisation short of what is necessary to reach their net-zero goal. Most of the utilities to have adopted net-zero targets have not yet taken tangible steps to realign their business model to meet them. …We also found a stark inconsistency in the quality of scenario analyses. Southern’s 2018 climate report failed to reckon with any of the key areas of risk identified by the TCFD. Origin’s 2017 and 2019 analyses excluded its integrated natural gas business, Duke’s 2017 and 2020 studies relied heavily on unproven technologies, AES’s 2018 analysis failed to break down the trajectory the company would have to follow on the way to meeting a 2°C scenario in 2050, and Dominion’s 2018 report neglected to address how the company intended to act on the results of its analysis” (S. 3). Mein Kommentar: Vgl. meinen Beitrag „Divestments bewirken mehr als Stimmrechtsausübungen oder Engagement“ aus dem Buch „Nachhaltige Finanzen – Durch aktives Aktionärstum und Engagement Wandel bewirken“ (kostenpflichtig) von CRIC – Verein zur Förderung von Ethik und Nachhaltigkeit in der Geldanlage vom Dezember 2020
Klimaresearch und Investments
Hohes Klimamodellrisiko: On the dependence of investor’s probability of default on climate transition scenarios (#291) Stefano Battiston und Irene Monasterolo vom 9. März 2021: “This paper provides the first model to assess how forward-looking climate transition risk scenarios and companies’ shares of revenues across low/high-carbon activities affect the valuation adjustment of corporate bonds, as well as the adjustments of an investor’s Expected Shortfall and PD (probability of default). … assumptions on the set of climate transition scenarios and their probability of occurrence plays a main role for investors’ risk management. Therefore, limiting the underestimation of losses due to climate transition risk, requires central banks to design climate stress tests with a wide enough sets of scenarios” (S. 19).
Nicht alle Klimarisiken sind eingepreist: Dissecting Climate Risks: Are they Reflected in Stock Prices? (#206) von Renato Faccini, Rastin Matin und George Skiadopoulos vom 17. März 2021: “We examine whether climate change risks are priced in the cross-section of U.S. stocks over 2000-2018. We dissect climate change risk in its multiple sources, including physical and transition, short-run and long-run risks, … We find that only the risk related to U.S. climate policy is priced, with investors requiring a greater expected return for stocks being more exposed to this risk factor … we find that investors hedge these risks by buying stocks of companies which show intention to improve their environmental policies, even if their current environmental score may not be relatively high” (S. 27).
Geringeres Klimarisiko mit besseren Renditen: Climate transition risk, profitability and stock prices (#18) von Juan Reboredoa und Andrea Ugolini vom 18. Mai 2021: “We consider whether the transition risks to a low-carbon economy are reflected in financial performance and cross-section pricing for publicly-traded European and US firms (S. 28). … The empirical evidence for the period 2013-2018 indicates that firms with lower compared to greater exposure to climate transition risks perform better in terms of ROA, ROE, EBITDA and Tobin’s q ratio. … European firms are more sensitive to climate transition risk than US firms. Our findings on pricing suggest that markets misprice the climate transition risk” (S. 29). Mein Kommentar: Vgl. Q1 ESG: Pure globale Aktien ESG Portfolios mit besonders guter Performance – Verantwortungsvolle (ESG) Geldanlage (prof-soehnholz.com) und hier ESG SDG: Sehr konsequente Aktienportfolios – Verantwortungsvolle (ESG) Geldanlage (prof-soehnholz.com)
Traditionelle und alternative Investments
Diversifikation funktioniert doch: Diversification during hard times (#18) von Najah Attig und Oumar Sy vom 18. Mai 2021: “There are important open questions in the literature on international diversification. … We find that international diversification dominated industrial diversification over the past 25 years. However, since the millennium turn, industrial diversification has been slightly the better alternative for managers limited to developed markets. Surprisingly, the benefits of international and industrial diversifications are countercyclical and do not appear to diminish during hard times. In fact, they increase during crises, recessions, bear markets, and times of high market fear. This evidence suggests that investors still must diversify in bad economic times” (S. 27).
Wenig Crowding bei Themen-ETFs: The Pressure of the Crowd: Stress Testing Thematic Indexes von Anil Rao und Thomas Verbraken von MSCI Research vom 17. Mai 2021: “Flows into thematic investments during the first quarter of 2021 kept up their rapid pace from 2020. Investors could be concerned about crowding in this segment. MSCI’s stock-crowding model revealed most MSCI thematic indexes were not significantly more crowded than the MSCI ACWI IMI Growth Index. Crowding in the efficient-energy theme rose throughout 2020 and stayed moderately high through Q1 2021. Its underperformance since March can be explained, in part, by its crowding characteristics. Mein Kommentar: Vgl. Drittes SDG ETF-Portfolio: Konform mit Art. 9 SFDR – Verantwortungsvolle (ESG) Geldanlage (prof-soehnholz.com)
Hochzinsanleihen mit besonders hohem Klimarisiko: Why Is Climate-Transition Risk High in High Yield? Von Bruno Rauis, Juan Sampieri und Andy Sparks von MSCI Research vom 6. Mai 2021: “We considered the transition risk of select U.S. corporate-bond and equity benchmarks under a climate-policy scenario designed to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5° Celsius by the year 2100. Counter to expectations, the high-yield-bond benchmark had the highest exposure to transition risk, owing to the relatively large proportion of high-yield bonds in the energy and materials sectors”.
Private Equity lohnt sich kaum: Diversifying Private Equity (#294) von Oleg Gredila, Yan Liub und Berk Sensoy vom 5. Mai 2021: “… because most institutional investors with portfolio allocations to private equity invest in just one or two funds per year, the idiosyncratic risk of the funds involved has a material impact on the value of the private equity program to the investor. This means that the focus in the literature on assessing whether the average performance of private equity suffices to compensate for its systematic risks is fundamentally incomplete, because this approach ignores idiosyncratic risk. … Our main findings are that the costs of imperfect diversification in PE portfolios are substantial at typical levels of diversification observed in the data; approximately 2% to 10% lower. … we find that the upper 15% of LPs by PE investment rates, those making five or more investments per year, are effectively fully diversified. … the results generally suggest that funds-of-funds are not worth their fees-on-fees, despite their built-in diversification, and although performance persistence exists, its benefits are overwhelmed by the increased idiosyncratic risk of chasing performance” (S. 24/25).
Behavioral Finance und Fintech
Noise und Bias bestimmen Entscheidungen: Sounding the alarm on system noise: McKinsey interview with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony vom 18. Mai 2021 in McKinsey Quarterly: “Noise is the unwanted variability in professional judgments. …bias is the average error in judgments … noise is the variability of error …The noise we’re talking about … is “system noise,” or unwanted variability within a system of judgments. A good example is the judicial system. Judges should be interchangeable. They should give the identical sentence in the identical case. When they don’t, that is system noise. We found the same dynamics in medicine, with underwriters in insurance, and in many other functions. …There can also be noise within an individual. …The sentences that judges hand down, for instance, can vary with the outside temperature. So it’s worse to be a defendant on hot days …The research shows that when you evaluate someone’s performance, only about one quarter of the rating is related to actual performance. The other three-quarters are related to noise. … we presented some of our … They gave the same set of data to all their analysts, and found that, on average, [between any two analysts] you would get a 44 percent difference in their evaluations …”
US Robos wachsen sehr stark: Bringing Transparency to Robo In vesting – Robo Report™ First Quarter 2021 von Backend Benchmarking vom 11. Mai 2021: “… there continues to be consolidation as the U.S. marketplace becomes increasingly competitive. … for firms … whose growth prospects look promising, funding continues to pour in. Second, there is a great deal of value accruing to the average investor, including free financial planning, access to SRI options at low minimums, digital banking services, and new innovative features like Self-Driving Money by Wealthfront. Finally, … investing online continues to gain popularity and trust” (S. 17).