Credit Ratings & Climate Change Resilience: A Framework for Assessing Airports, Seaports, & Toll Roads
Date
2022-05
Authors
Brown-Neuhaus, Virginia Gale
Harloe, Christopher
Kwekam, Gilles David
Lu, George
Quenga, Joseph
Snyder, William
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Abstract
This report provides a framework for incorporating climate change resilience in Fitch Ratings’ credit rating assessments of airports, seaports, and toll roads. We build on current transportation resilience practices and climate-related assessments, key credit rating drivers, stakeholder interviews, and analysis of nonrecourse municipal securities official statements to develop a conceptual resilience framework that may be useful in expanding into Fitch Ratings credit rating process for transportation projects. This proposed framework can help develop quantifiable information to determine a project’s resiliency by analyzing these factors: project type, asset level; asset productivity; and strategic response planning. By focusing on the vulnerabilities and portfolio exposure, the framework provides a means to assess a project’s climate-related risks and resilience that can be easily distinguished between a high, medium, and low risk-resilience metric.
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Keywords
Credit Ratings, Climate change