Climate Risk Web App

Developing a business-facing web app for climate risk assessment with the UN.

Context

Climate risk management was still relatively new, and as such, banks required support to understand the latest transition risk scenarios and potential impact on their organizations. My team worked with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and 16 banks to build a web tool that guides users through the climate scenario analysis process, visualizes the impact of climate transition scenarios on a bank’s lending portfolio, and enables banks to better understand their exposure and appropriately plan risk mitigation. The web app leveraged an existing Excel model that was considered too complicated to use and had not seen large adoption among the UN member banks.

Goals

Success criteria for this project included the ability to replicate the existing Excel model functionality and provide:

  • User-friendly interface (reducing user error).

  • Context / education on climate scenarios (by sector and geography) with a visual and clear narrative.

  • Guidance on most difficult inputs (e.g. borrower sample selection, sensitivities calibration).

  • Ability to compare results across segments.

  • Support in socializing results across an organization.

Approach

We started off by conducting a series of user interviews to learn more about our users, their needs, and their specific pain points regarding using the existing climate risk tool. This allowed us to design an entirely new experience as we worked to re-platform the methodology from Excel into Python.

UX:

  • Introduced a “scenario narrator” feature to visualize and educate users on the climate transition scenarios (consisting of hundreds of economic variables). This enabled users to more easily develop scenario assumptions necessary to complete the analysis.

  • Streamlined the data input process, providing contextual guidance on what the different inputs mean.

  • Enhanced the result analysis with a dynamic dashboard that clearly visualizes the scenario outcomes.

  • Added reporting capabilities that make it easy to socialize the results across the banks’ broader teams.

  • Designed a visual system to elevate the user experience.

Platform & security:

  • Developed a secure, collaborative web app that provides public access to the educational elements of the climate risk assessment methodology, while allowing each member bank to have a separate account where its uploaded credit data is kept private.

Results

The team ultimately released a polished, user-friendly web app that significantly increased engagement with the climate risk assessment methodology. This was a first-of-its-kind climate risk tool that was launched at Climate Week NYC 2020.