© Adam Sébire / Climate Visuals
If the world wants to avoid a potential 50% drop in GDP as a result of climate change impacts, policies need to account for greater levels of warming than are currently expected, a group of experts has warned.
To help policymakers and investors understand the discrepancy between climate projections and policy outcomes, a team from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the University of Exeter have published a tool called the Planetary Solvency Risk Dashboard.
The tool helps visualise and assess the risks of continuing with current economic and climate policies and the impact of potential climate triggers. For example, it shows the impact of global food and water shortages, as well as climate tipping points like ice sheets melting and rising sea levels, ranking them from extremely unlikely to highly likely.
Divided into four areas – climate, nature, society and economy – the dashboard also makes suggestions for policies that could help lower the risk trajectory, such as implementing risk assessments and planning for migration caused by climate change.
The dashboard aims to help businesses and governments become aware of the increased risks from climate change using risk-led methodologies. It also includes historical data from 1990 to 2025 to show how climate change risk has grown worse over time due to slow action from policymakers.
The climate risk tool is a supplement to the group’s prior research on potential GDP declines and how climate scenarios grossly underestimating the risk from climate change.
Sandy Trust, a council member of the IFoA, said using a risk-led methodology such as the dashboard could help policymakers “avoid catastrophic impacts”.
“Nature is our foundation, providing food, water and air, as well as the raw materials and energy that power our economy. Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity which we must take action to avoid,” he said.
Jesse Abrams, a researcher at the University of Exeter, said recent global events have reinforced the world’s trajectory towards climate tipping points while extreme weather events are happening sooner than expected.
“This makes it crucial to implement policies that account for the highest expected risks, until clear evidence shows us that these worst-case impacts have been avoided,” he said.
This page was last updated March 18, 2025
Written by
Moriah Costa is the Editor-in-Chief of Green Central Banking and has over a decade of experience writing about banking and finance. She is an award-winning American journalist based in Paris and has written for major international publications, including Reuters, The Guardian, and S&P Global. Having grown up in water-stressed Arizona, she has always had a strong interest in bringing awareness to climate and environmental issues.
