Key takeaways from the inaugural Sustainable1 Climate Summit hosted by the S&P Global Climate Center of Excellence
The first Sustainable1 Climate Summit hosted by the S&P Global Climate Center of Excellence convened world-class climate scientists and corporate leaders to discuss cutting-edge developments in climate, environmental and nature research and methodology.
Companies are increasingly seeking to tie climate change to financial decision-making. To do so, they need granular data that can be translated into actionable insights.
This can be a challenge, as significant barriers remain between disciplines. Events like the Climate Summit seek to break down those silos by bringing together perspectives from science, economics and the public and private sectors.
Climate conversations are about risk and opportunity, with an increasing focus on the opportunities that adaptation investment presents.
On June 5, 2025, S&P Global Sustainable1 held its inaugural Climate Summit hosted by the S&P Global Climate Center of Excellence.
The center is home to world-class scientists dedicated to addressing the frontiers of long-term climate, environmental and nature research and methodology development. The Climate Summit in New York City convened many of those scientists alongside financial institutions and industry leaders to help answer the question: How do you translate the science into insights that inform investment and financial decision-making?
Climate science is on the bleeding edge of scientific, economic and sociological knowledge — and will continue to be at the heart of our response to the climate crisis.
Throughout the June 5 event, we heard how the Climate Center of Excellence is working to bridge knowledge gaps between disciplines. At S&P Global, our climate scientists work together with economists on cross-disciplinary research and knowledge sharing. This can pave the way for improvements in climate modeling. In other words: you can’t act in a silo.
This is a message we heard from several speakers at the Climate Summit. As S&P Global Ratings Chief Economist Paul Gruenwald explained it, often the language gaps between economic and science communities are so wide, it’s as if “economists are from Mars, climate scientists are from Venus.”
On that same panel, we heard from Dr. Sarah Kapnick, who recently joined JPMorgan after serving as Chief Scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. During her tenure at NOAA, Dr. Kapnick told us in a podcast interview something that captures the spirit of our inaugural Climate Summit. She said:
"To start creating climate action, it's going to take everyone. It's not just the scientists."
If you’ve been reading recent headlines, you know how important it is to facilitate these conversations right now. Understanding climate change and what that means for businesses is increasingly urgent. To put a dollar figure on it, S&P Global Sustainable1 recently published research projecting that for the world’s largest companies, climate physical risks will have a $1.2 trillion annual price tag by the 2050s. That’s using the S&P Global Sustainable1 Climate Physical Risk dataset.
Those figures represent a baseline of potential losses without accounting for adaptation measures that could help blunt the damage companies and communities are expected to experience from climate change. More focus is turning to adaptation and resilience as climate costs rise. S&P Global also recently published research looking into adaptation planning and found that even as climate costs are rising, few companies actually have a climate physical risk adaptation plan in place — only 35% of listed companies in our analysis. That’s based on data collected in the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment.
As climate physical risks become more frequent and severe, the slow progress on corporate adaptation planning presents crucial risks to the global economy.
But JPMorgan’s Dr. Kapnick noted that climate conversations are about risk and opportunity. She noted that the bank’s clients are working to understand when and how to adapt, and that over the past year there has been an increasing focus on the returns possible from adaptation investment.
S&P Global published research with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, exploring the opportunities for adaptation solution providers and for asset owners to invest in adaptation. The study examined some readily available climate adaptation solutions for non-residential real estate, such as green or cool roofs and wet or dry floodproofing. We estimate the annual demand for these solutions to reach approximately $29 billion annually through 2050 (or $726 billion in total).
So, clearly, the stakes are high. And our clients are paying attention. They’re trying to decide the next steps, and where and how to invest.
We heard throughout the Climate Summit that companies and financial institutions are seeking to understand how climate will impact their business. Another of our speakers, Aniket Shah of Jefferies, told the audience that decisionmakers need “data, not vibes” to guide their strategies.
And panelist Christian Klose from the municipal bond insurer Assured Guaranty noted that it needs to be the right data at the appropriate level of granularity. As panelist John Goldstein from Goldman Sachs put it: “We want better data on fewer things that matter more.”
Climate modeling involves analyzing and synthesizing a huge amount of data. As we heard at the Climate Summit, the challenge extends beyond just analysis to translation: It’s one thing to have the data; it’s quite another to be able to explain the methodology clearly and translate this into decision-useful information for your audience.
Our scientists in the Climate Center of Excellence are incredibly skilled at that act of translation and communication. You can hear examples of them in action, explaining wildfires and hurricanes on S&P Global’s All Things Sustainable podcast.
You can learn more about the Climate Center of Excellence, its mission and its ongoing research here: Climate Center of Excellence | S&P Global.
This piece was published by S&P Global Sustainable1 and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.