Carbon pricing and the impact on financial markets

Abstract: Responsible investing has become a trend throughout financial markets. As World’s economies pledge to decrease the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, environmental policies like carbon pricing (CP) are expected to be strengthened; the above is attributed to the effort of internalizing the environmental costs of the current economic system. In the same context where asset owners have been demanding to the private sector for greater coverage of Environmental Social Governance (ESG) issues, understanding exposure and risk to carbon taxation and emission trading schemes (ETS) could be a major driver for responsible investing. Nonetheless, it has been found that this environmental policy to price emissions, falls behind from a harmonized cost per emission across sectors and geographies. Defined and assessed through a quantitative scenario analysis on scope 1 emissions, all information on carbon pricing set the basis for the model. From an investing perspective, the results showed higher exposure for the electricity sector by 2030 and 2050; nonetheless, the riskiest sector to invest at, was shown as industry. The above is based on the current and expected carbon dependency, and the expected increase in coverage from carbon pricing mechanisms respectively. In addition, aviation, which is a sub-sector from offroad transportation, showed to be the main source for this sector´s exposure and risk. It is concluded that the research carried out is a first step from a complete analysis on CP, as scope 2 emissions need to be assessed.