The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has announced the setting up of UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment (CGFI) supported by the Data and Analytics for National Infrastructure (DAFNI) computational platform.
The centre is being established by a consortium of seven major UK research institutions, led by the University of Oxford with partners STFC, the Universities of Leeds, Bristol, Reading, Imperial College London and The Alan Turing Institute.
It will run a programme of working with banks, insurers, pension funds, asset managers and others in the financial services sector to explore how we might more effectively and efficiently deal with the impacts of climate change and environmental risks. This will be aimed at enabling them to be more flexible and make more sustainable investments.
CGFI will use the DAFNI platform, hosted by STFC in a partnership led by the University of Oxford, to combine environmental data and predictions of future climate with complex computer models of towns and regions. These can be used to estimate the risks of future investment scenarios.
It will also be used to share results with stakeholder in the financial industry.
Resilient to risks
Dr Brian Matthews, lead on DAFNI, said: “The CGFI represents a great opportunity to apply research on the environment to this key sector of the UK’s economy. We aim to deliver the tools that will enable the UK’s financial systems to be more resilient to risks such as increased flooding, reduced crop yields or water shortages, while opening up the new opportunities that green technologies offer.
“We have already built a computational platform tailored for these problems and will use our expertise to demonstrate the predicative power of modelling the environment and infrastructure, and sharing it with our industrial partners. I look forward to working with the great research team in Oxford and across the consortium to help prepare the UK for these challenges ahead.”
Other plans for CGFI include the delivery of a stakeholder facing application and service catalogue to be used by non-computer specialists, and the sharing of reusable data via the FAIR standards (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) across its user communities.
A spokesperson for STFC said the centre will also make use of its JASMIN facility, which it describes as half super computer and half data centre.
Image: JASMIN facility from STFC
