TTRP21-05 An Indicative Assessment of Four Key Areas of Climate Risk for the 2021 NSW Intergenerational Report

Climate risks are expected to materially impact NSW’s long term economic and fiscal outlook. International financial institutions, including credit ratings agencies Moody’s and S&P Global, and central banks through the Network for Greening the Financial System, are increasingly considering climate risks as part of their long-term risk assessments.

Understanding the potential scale and direction of these impacts will improve the quality of estimates for the 2021 NSW Intergenerational Report (IGR) and contribute to prudent and transparent fiscal management.

This paper sets out an approach to assessing physical climate risks for the NSW Intergenerational Report(IGR) and deploys this approach with respect to four initial areas of physical climate risk:

1. selected costs of natural disasters
2. property and land damage from sea level rise
3. the effects of heatwaves on workplace productivity
4. the effects of climate change on agricultural production.

This is intended to provide an initial analytical framework, evidentiary foundation, and reference case for long-term economic and fiscal risks. This approach provides a foundation that can be extended in the future to cover a broader range of climate risks and deeper analysis of the risks identified in this paper.