EDHEC Research Insights supplement to Investment & Pensions Europe (IPE) 2026

Building on a highly productive 2025, we enter 2026 with an ambitious research agenda focused on delivering robust, data-driven insights on climate-related risks. The EDHEC Climate Institute has launched high-impact initiatives such as Scientific Climate Ratings. We act as an interface between climate science, regulatory developments and industry practice, ensuring research findings are relevant for decision-makers.

This issue opens with a fundamental question addressed by Nicolas Schneider: where and how does climate change translate into economic damage? An innovative
analysis of climate damage at the geo-sectoral level provides a more granular answer, showing that impacts vary not only across regions but also across sectors within the same geography.

Once these damages are identified, we need to understand the impact on asset valuation. Our second article by Lionel Melin and Fangyuan Zhang therefore examines a critical yet often overlooked component of valuation models: climate state-dependent discount factors. By explicitly linking discount rates to climate conditions, the authors show how climate risk reshapes expectations, aggregate risk and asset pricing, and provide a key methodological foundation for climate-aware valuation.

This framework is then applied at the corporate level in an article by David Labeurthre, Thomas Lorans and Julien Priol. Extending earlier work on infrastructure assets, the authors show how climate data can be translated into company-specific, financially relevant metrics. 

We then return to infrastructure with Jeanette Orminski’s presentation of the quantification of climate risk impact on infrastructure asset valuation, which highlights both the consistency of the methodology across asset classes and the specific challenges of these long-lived, asset-specific and capital-intensive assets.

Anthony Schrapffer and Nicolas Schneider then bring a shorter time horizon view, considering the weather impacts on commodities. In commodity markets, short- and medium-term weather conditions play a central role, making weather information directly relevant for pricing and risk management over horizons much shorter than those used in long-term asset valuation.

We continue with two articles from the ClimaTech initiative, which is extending its earlier work on infrastructure to corporate sectors. In the first, Conor Hubert and Catherine Tubb explore how ClimaTech’s work on infrastructure resilience and decarbonisation can be integrated into the EU Taxonomy. In the second, Rob Arnold and Catherine Tubb examine whether sustainability standards can capture progress in reducing climate risk for hotel assets, offering a concrete real-estate case in a sector often overlooked despite being highly exposed to climate risk.

In our concluding feature, Frédéric Ducoulombier revisits the legacy of Mark Carney’s ‘Tragedy of the Horizon’, examining how a decade of disclosure progress reshaped finance but fell short of driving real-economy change, and how the backlash against transparency and climate action now threatens both risk management and the transition.