Practice

My active practice is the development and application of stochastic transition-risk models that quantify how climate policy, carbon pricing, energy and real-economy constraints propagate through industries — and how those propagations bear on the financial questions long-horizon investment turns on: asset values, project economics, financing conditions, the investment cases capital has to make today against a 2050 backdrop. The objective is not to forecast carbon prices in isolation but to read where transition costs land, on whom, and on what timing.

The discipline is recognisably actuarial. Where standard climate-modelling often runs a few central scenarios and reads off point answers, the actuarial stance is distributions over uncertain quantities and time horizons long enough that constraint accumulation, not near-term price movement, dominates the analysis. This is the discipline ALM and stochastic modelling brought to insurance portfolios, applied now to the constraints transition imposes on the real economy.

The work sits on a single modelling apparatus that brings supply and demand into the same frame, measured cross-sector, and applies it case by case as the sectoral situations warrant.

The integrated model

Resources — biomass, renewable electricity, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, capital — are competed for across industries, and constraints on any one of them set the binding price somewhere in the system. Reading a single sector in isolation routinely misses where the binding constraint actually sits, because the binding constraint is rarely sectoral. The model is therefore deliberately cross-sector: it tracks supply and demand for the shared resources together, so that competition between sectors is visible and the price-setting margin can be identified rather than assumed.

The architecture is modular. A Core module handles the cross-sector integration and the macro-financial transmission — the spine of the model, on which all sectoral work hangs. Sector-specific modules adapt that framework to the particularities of individual industries: their production processes, regulatory regimes, feedstock and energy intensities, and the channels through which transition risk reaches investment decisions in that sector. The Core is currently being rebuilt around a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) in place of the earlier vector error-correction (VECM) foundation; the SVAR is better suited to the modular sector-extension architecture and is easier to discipline with identifying restrictions drawn from the structural picture each sector brings.

Two working papers already set up the framework. Carbon as a Capital Risk Factor (Working Paper 01) treats carbon pricing as a risk factor — pricing carbon allowance scarcity into long-horizon investment decisions. The EU ETS in Numbers (Working Paper 02) reconstructs the EU ETS cap component by component, supplying the structural anchor those calculations rest on.

Cases

Each sector-specific module is operationalised as a case. A case is a published working paper that sets out the substance, paired (where ready) with an interactive online tool that lets a reader put numbers into a slice of the model. Future cases sit naturally on the same architecture: each one is a new module against the same Core.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel — active. Sustainable Aviation Fuel — From Feedstock to Fuel (Working Paper 03) sets out a producer-agnostic process network — one that maps the SAF industrial system rather than any single producer’s plant — covering the principal certified SAF and e-SAF pathways from feedstock to fuel. The companion SAF inputs calculator inverts the network: given a target volume of a chosen SAF type, it returns the inputs required, the side-products and residuals, and the feedstock, power and regulatory ceilings the request approaches. Sustainable Aviation Fuel — From Network to Scenario (Working Paper 04, draft for public comment) then drives that process network with NGFS Phase 5 Net Zero 2050 and Below 2°C trajectories for EU27+EFTA and the UK, and reads the resulting supply, cost and residual-fossil trajectories through a financial and underwriting lens.

Biocircular construction — in development. The same process-network framework extended to construction materials and the resource competition that surrounds them — biomass, recycled inputs, energy — under the cap layered by EU CBAM and ETS-2. Working paper and case-specific tool to follow.

Maritime carbon allowances and sustainable fuels — in development. The EU ETS extension to shipping is now in force, with FuelEU Maritime layered on top. The maritime case picks up the same supply-and-demand pattern as SAF — competing for renewable electricity, biomass and low-carbon fuels — at a different scale and with different fuel routes. Working paper and tool to follow.

Engagement

Engagements typically take the form of focused analytical reviews, working-paper collaborations, or the development of bespoke model components against a specific sectoral or institutional question. The readers most likely to find the analysis useful are institutional investors and asset owners pricing long-horizon transition exposure, lenders and insurers stress-testing portfolios under explicit transition scenarios, infrastructure developers and industrial companies whose investment cases depend on how transition costs land, and partners building carbon-data, lifecycle or asset-servicing offerings to which an actuarial transition-risk layer adds something they don’t currently carry themselves. I work either standalone or as an embedded analytical layer within those partners — complementing rather than competing with their offerings.

The model and its sector-specific modules are work in progress. This page describes the intended architecture as well as the parts that already exist; the cases listed as “in development” are flagged as such honestly, on the principle that a research-and-practice site should be transparent about the stage each piece is at.