The LA Times reports,”The municipal bond market looks to satellites to help assess climate risk”
The $3.8-trillion municipal-bond market has found a new tool in its effort to understand the effects of climate change: satellites orbiting Earth.
Assessing climate risks is a particularly vexing problem given that U.S. state and local governments tend to give investors information that’s too little or just too late. But the use of geospatial data and information from sources such as Google Earth could help municipal bond investors evaluate and price the risks posed from a warming climate, rising sea levels and natural disasters.
“Largely, finance lives in columns and rows in Excel spreadsheets — climate change is not a row-and-column exercise,” said Chris Goolgasian, director of climate research at Wellington Management, a Boston asset manager that uses mapping technology to consider the effects of climate change on investments including municipal bonds. “It’s much more powerful to see it visualized.”