Innovate UK CERAF Businesses

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Innovate UK CERAF Businesses

Innovate UK, the UK’s national innovation agency, is funding solutions that integrate climate and environmental factors into financial services through its SBRI – Climate and Environmental Risk Analytics for Resilient Finance (CERAF) competition.

CGFI is supporting Innovate UK and successful applicants to deliver the next generation of green finance analytics.

INNOVATION AT THE CGFI ANNUAL FORUM 2024

Innovation is one of CGFI’s key pillars. We work to nurture and support a vibrant ecosystem of enterprises providing climate and environmental analytics for finance, built on robust science.

In the CGFI Annual Forum Innovation Showcase, early-stage climate and environmental analytics businesses supported by the CERAF programme shared their innovations and discussed how the ecosystem can be supported to deliver next-generation climate/environmental data and analytics for the financial sector.

Find out more about the businesses below.

CaRiS addresses the lack of focus on climate and environmental risk (CER) in the financial services industry by bringing visibility and understanding of operational and embodied carbon of residential assets and investment portfolios. CaRiS is an innovative tool that draws open access data from technical models to provide a value-adding carbon risk scoring, alongside benchmarks, for residential assets. It allows better decision-making in managing portfolios via a consistent methodology to address the transition risk to decarbonisation.

BRE Group

ClimateKick's vision for a Green Digital Investment Bank transforms the way funds engage with climate-related investments. By leveraging financial-tokenization, ClimateKick scout, arrange and distribute green infrastructure investments, scaling climate technologies and reshaping the landscape of sustainable finance.

Climate Kick

FireX.ai provides dynamic wildfire risk assessment tools that integrate directly with existing insurance loss curves to generate precise property exposure maps. We use a fusion of physical modelling and data-driven approaches to produce high-resolution, high-accuracy risk maps. We are also planning to expand in the future to other environmental catastrophes as well.

FireX.ai

We tackle the climate crisis head on, by providing individuals and businesses emissions data to become more sustainable by reducing their emissions at source. Today, Greenr helps organisations measure their emissions, engage their workforce to reduce emissions at source and support nature-based projects for unavoidable emissions.

GreenR

Maximum Information aims to improve societal resilience to natural catastrophes by evolving the deployment and use of catastrophe risk models. Our private market facing, SaaS-based catastrophe model evaluation tool, Magniphi, connects directly into risk and loss information provided by catastrophe model vendors and re/insurers to automate their hazard, vulnerability and loss analyses. This enables rapid and resilient view-of-risk construction and adjustment, and the automation of cumbersome reporting associated with model deployment.

Maximum Information

Previsico pioneers an unparalleled solution to combat the pervasive threat of surface water flooding. By harnessing real-time hydrodynamic modelling, sensor technology, and weather analytics, Previsico delivers property-level flood forecasts, a crucial advancement in flood management. Unlike any other offering, Previsico's forecasts incorporate the latest rainfall predictions and undergo rigorous validation. Through property-level alerts, via email and dashboard, Previsico empowers organisations to proactively respond to evolving flood events, setting a new standard in flood warning technology.

Previsico

City Science is a company founded in 2015, with a clear goal to help decarbonise using cutting-edge technologies and data-driven approaches to design and optimise environments for improved mobility, sustainability and quality of life. Our project aims to create a platform that offers comprehensive carbon analytics, including scope 3 assessments for unlisted equities and SMEs. The platform will bridge the critical gap in carbon intensity data by linking detailed datasets for unlisted equities and SMEs with robust estimation and validation techniques.

City Science

We publish both historic estimates and future projections of changes in water supply (by source type) and water demand (by user type) for local catchments. We do so by integrating earth observation with insight gleaned from in situ measurements, along with contextual data on land use, agricultural output, urban density, industrial activity and other indicators. Our approach focuses on individual catchments, principally in the global South, where a need for this data has been identified and validated by. Principal use cases come from industry, the financial services sector, and government.

Watermarq

PROJECTS AT THE CGFI ANNUAL FORUM 2023

The CGFI Annual Forum 2023 showcased some of the successful innovation projects funded in CERAF Phase 2.

Project representatives joined Prof Iain Clacher for a panel discussion with Q&A around the future of climate and environmental analytics for green finance. They also shared their work in the networking space throughout the day.

Find more details and links to businesses’ sites below:

Alo Mundus

Connecting businesses and nature projects for sustainable communities.

The Alo Mundus platform is designed to meet the challenge of enabling financial services to identify and responsibly invest in high-quality urban forestry and nature-based solutions. The platform provides detailed, verifiable forecasting, valuation and monitoring of biodiversity and the environmental and social impact of urban nature projects. We are developing novel methodologies for the holistic quantification of environmental, social and biodiversity impacts. Our product will contribute to scientific knowledge around quantifying net-positive projects, including those to reduce urban heat islands and air pollution and enhance biodiversity.

Alo Mundus

City Science

Detailed Scope 3 Analytics for Unlisted Assets

City Science

Maximum Information

LOSS-SAMPLER: Tools for quantifying and managing unseen volatility in Climate & Environmental Risk (CER) portfolios

Maximum Information is committed to increasing societal resilience to natural hazards through the evolution of risk modelling. Key to our vision is proving the value that catastrophe (cat) models have in forming real-world views of risk. Our analytical engine - LOSS-SAMPLER - utilises contemporary cat models to tackle three specific business challenges for which demand has rapidly increased in the past few years, namely: 1. Assisting in the validation & evaluation of cat-models, and implementing reliable views of risk 2. Informing cat-risk portfolio management 3. Quantifying and communicating the financial impacts of climate change

Maximum Information

Renewable Risk

The Insurance-Debt Nexus: a proposed OFTO mutual

Renewable Risk is a specialist risk management / insurance claims consultancy and insurance broker with an unparalleled depth of experience of risk mitigation in the renewable energy sector. Delivered in partnership with the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult and Prospect Law, the proposed Offshore Transmission Owner (OFTO) mutual will improve the insurability, bankability, and risk management of UK offshore wind. The best risk managers are the asset owners. So rather than try to educate the insurance companies, it is better to be the insurance company themselves. As well as enhancing energy security, this also saves money for the consumer.

Renewable Risk

BRE – Building Research Establishment Ltd

CaRiS – Real Estate Portfolio Carbon Risk Score

BRE Group

HSAT

Inference

Helping companies understand and predict food supplies around the world - using an unparalleled combination of satellite, weather, and on-the-ground visits. Resulting in highly accurate predictions on a wide range of crops. Field level accuracy. Global scale. We have over 2,000 people collecting data from Brazil to Bangladesh, this is the largest ground survey team in the world. We have deployed resources in crises such as floods in Pakistan, earthquakes in Turkey of conflict in Sudan – within days, or hours of an incident. This is global first, providing unrivalled scale and precision. Any crop. Any location. Any Scale.

HSAT

Oxford Earth Observation

WaterTrace: catchment-scale water risk analysis

Oxford Earth Observation

PROJECTS AT THE CGFI ANNUAL FORUM 2022

The 2022 Annual Forum featured successful innovation projects funded in the first phase of Innovate UK’s SBRI CERAF programme. Browse the projects below by theme.