The investment management industry is facing a fundamental architectural challenge. For years, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors have often been treated as overlays—separate datasets acquired from external vendors, stored in specialized platforms, and consulted by investment teams when required. But this architecture increasingly conflicts with the economic reality of climate change.
Climate risk is not simply an ESG characteristic. Physical risks such as water scarcity, extreme weather, and changing resource availability can directly affect production, operating costs, capital expenditure, and corporate cash flows. At the same time, the transition to a lower-carbon economy can create new demand, reshape competitive positions, and require substantial investment. These forces ultimately influence the fundamental value of companies.
For asset managers, the implication is profound: climate intelligence should not sit beside valuation systems; it should flow through them.
The architectural question is therefore not whether climate data should be incorporated into investment decisions. It is how the investment technology stack should translate climate information into financial value.
A particularly important question emerges when climate risk is incorporated into a Discounted Cash Flow model: should climate risk affect the numerator—the projected cash flows—or the denominator—the discount rate?
A common approach is to add a climate risk premium to the Weighted Average Cost of Capital. Conceptually, this appears simple: increase the discount rate for companies exposed to greater climate risk and therefore reduce their valuation. But this approach can create significant architectural problems.
First, it can result in double-counting. If climate scenarios already reduce revenue, increase operating costs, or require additional capital expenditure, adding another climate premium to WACC may price the same risk twice. Second, localized operational risks are not necessarily systematic risks. A water shortage affecting a particular mining operation, for example, may be highly material to that company's cash flows without representing a risk that should automatically increase the company's entire cost of capital.
This suggests a stronger architecture: translate operational climate risks primarily into the numerator—Free Cash Flow to the Firm—and reserve changes to the denominator for genuinely systematic changes in market risk.
This distinction matters because valuation is ultimately about economic consequences. Climate scenarios should not merely produce a risk score. They should produce changes in the assumptions that determine enterprise value.
Consider the example of Antofagasta plc, a copper miner operating primarily in water-stressed regions of Chile. The underlying scenario analysis demonstrates how dramatically climate assumptions can change valuation. Under the unadjusted base case, the model produces an indicated equity value of £15.45 per share. Under a severe physical-risk scenario, where drought causes production quantities to decline by 2% annually, the indicated value falls to £6.01 per share.
The significance of this example is not the precise valuation number. It is the mechanism through which the number changes.
In the severe physical-risk scenario, water scarcity directly constrains production. That reduction flows into revenue, NOPAT, terminal value, and ultimately equity value. Terminal NOPAT falls from £1,308.6 million to £898.1 million, while terminal value falls to £11,659 million. The resulting equity value is more than 60% below the base case.
This is precisely what a well-designed valuation architecture should do: translate a physical climate variable into an operational consequence and then into a financial consequence.
But climate risk is only half of the equation.
A sophisticated architecture must also model adaptation.
In the Antofagasta example, investments in desalination and seawater infrastructure fundamentally change the company's exposure to water scarcity. The Los Pelambres desalination expansion, together with Centinela's seawater operations, creates a different operational trajectory. Although production experiences near-term disruption, the model assumes recovery as water infrastructure reduces exposure to drought. The resulting terminal NOPAT rises to £1,126.4 million and terminal value reaches £19,559 million, producing an indicated equity value of £11.60 per share.
The important insight is that adaptation is itself a valuation variable.
Climate-resilient infrastructure requires capital. That capital expenditure reduces near-term free cash flow, but it may protect future production and cash generation. A valuation architecture that captures only climate exposure but not adaptation investment will systematically misprice companies that are actively building resilience.
This also exposes a weakness in static valuation multiples.
EV/EBITDA multiples are convenient, but EBITDA does not account for capital expenditure. Two companies can generate similar EBITDA while having dramatically different requirements for sustaining that EBITDA. A mining company that must invest billions in desalination infrastructure to maintain production should not necessarily be valued in the same way as a competitor with abundant natural water resources.
For climate-sensitive businesses, the architecture of terminal value therefore matters enormously.
Cash-flow-based DCF models provide a more natural mechanism for incorporating adaptation costs, operational constraints, and long-term resilience. Multiples remain useful as a cross-validation mechanism, but relying exclusively on historical multiples risks embedding yesterday's capital structure, operating environment, and climate assumptions into tomorrow's valuation.
The broader architectural lesson is that climate data needs a causal pathway into valuation.
A future-ready asset management platform should therefore be designed around three interconnected layers.
The first is the data ingestion layer. Rather than relying predominantly on aggregated ESG scores, the architecture should ingest operational and physical indicators such as localized hydrology, river flows, climate stress maps, carbon accounting data, desalination costs, and carbon-price projections.
The second is the financial modelling layer. Climate variables must be translated into financial assumptions. A water shortage might reduce production volumes. A carbon price might increase operating costs. A transition investment might increase capex and depreciation. These relationships should become explicit, traceable modelling rules rather than analyst judgement hidden in spreadsheets.
The third is the portfolio optimization layer. Investment managers should not receive a single deterministic intrinsic value and assume that it represents the future. Instead, the platform should expose valuation distributions across multiple climate pathways, allowing portfolio managers to understand how portfolio value changes under different physical and transition scenarios.
This architecture also changes the role of the Enterprise Architect.
The Enterprise Architect is no longer simply connecting ESG data platforms to investment applications. The role becomes one of designing the causal chain between climate reality and investment value.
That means establishing a governed data lineage from physical observations to climate scenarios, from scenarios to operational assumptions, from assumptions to financial forecasts, and from financial forecasts to portfolio decisions. It means making assumptions transparent, versioned, auditable, and reproducible. Most importantly, it means ensuring that climate intelligence becomes part of the investment decision engine rather than another dashboard sitting beside it.
This is where the concept of Climate Valuation Architecture becomes useful.
The objective is not to build another ESG platform. It is to create an architectural capability in which climate scenarios become first-class inputs to valuation. Data should flow through a controlled chain:
Climate reality → Scenario → Operational impact → Financial impact → Valuation → Portfolio decision
Once this architecture exists, climate analysis becomes much more than reporting. It becomes an investment capability.
The ultimate objective should therefore be to move from asking, "What is this company's climate score?" to asking, "How does climate change alter this company's future cash generation, capital requirements, competitive position, and intrinsic value?"
That is a much harder question—but it is also the question that matters.
Climate change is not a thematic trend that can be isolated inside a specialist ESG function. It is a structural force capable of changing corporate cash generation and therefore asset values.
For asset managers, the next generation of investment architecture will be defined by the ability to connect these two worlds.
The future of climate investing is not better ESG overlays. It is valuation architecture that understands climate.
