As climate risk becomes inseparable from financial performance, this opening session sets the stage for Forecast 2026 by focusing on the central challenge and opportunity facing investors today: quantifying and integrating physical climate risk into core investment decisions.

In a fireside chat, Matthew Eby will be joined by Richard Manley, Chief Sustainability Officer of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, to discuss how CPP is operationalizing physical climate risk across its investment platform. Richard will share how physical risk is being embedded into investor workflows, partner due diligence expectations, and portfolio oversight—offering a real-world blueprint for applying CRFM to build more disciplined, forward-looking portfolios.

Climate science is evolving quickly, with important advances and persistent limitations that directly affect how physical climate risk is understood today. This session focuses on the current state of climate science, highlighting recent breakthroughs in climate modeling and hazard research while addressing ongoing challenges such as uncertainty, regional variability, and data gaps.

Speakers will discuss what is well established, where caution is still required, and how scientific progress is improving the clarity and relevance of climate insights. The session is designed to help investors understand how today’s climate science can be responsibly interpreted and applied, helping them separate meaningful signal from noise as climate risk continues to unfold.

Climate change is reshaping investment geography, with hazard exposure, insurance dynamics, and economic fundamentals increasingly diverging across regions. This session examines how investors are evaluating physical climate risk alongside population trends, GDP exposure, and insurance availability to identify emerging patterns and regional themes.

Panelists will discuss how differences in hazard exposure and insurance pricing are influencing market risk, asset resilience, and long-term return potential. The conversation will focus on how investors are incorporating these factors into geostrategic decisions, determining where risk is accumulating, where it may be mispriced, and how climate-adjusted regional analysis is changing where capital flows.

This session focuses on how physical climate risk is evaluated at the asset and building level during acquisition and underwriting. Panelists will discuss how investors assess location-specific hazards alongside the critical infrastructure and systems that assets depend on, including power, transportation, water, and insurance availability.

Drawing on experience across real estate, energy, and infrastructure, the conversation will examine how climate data and scenarios are used to identify vulnerabilities that can affect operability, cash flow stability, and long-term asset performance. The discussion will highlight what investors consider when underwriting individual assets, how infrastructure dependencies can amplify risk, and how climate risk is increasingly shaping deal screening and investment decisions.

Physical climate risk often manifests first within company operations and supply chains, long before it appears in financial statements. This session examines how climate-related disruptions affect production, logistics, suppliers, and counterparties across complex global networks.

The discussion will focus on how organizations identify exposure across facilities and supply chains, manage operational risk, and build resilience amid increasingly frequent disruptions. The session will also explore how these risks translate into credit assessment, client engagement, and financing decisions, highlighting how physical climate risk is shaping corporate strategy and capital relationships.

Once physical climate risk is identified, investors and asset owners face a critical set of decisions about how that risk is managed. This session focuses on the intersection of adaptation and risk transfer, examining when it makes sense to invest in resilience and when risk can or should be transferred through insurance or other mechanisms.T

he discussion will explore how institutions evaluate tradeoffs between adaptation investments and insurance costs, how changing pricing and coverage availability influence those decisions, and how physical climate risk analytics are informing capital planning. The session will highlight how adaptation and insurance increasingly interact in determining asset performance and long-term resilience across real estate, infrastructure, and public and private assets.

This closing session brings together the day’s insights, from geostrategy to asset-level risk, and looks ahead to how physical climate risk is becoming unavoidable in investment decision-making. Matthew Eby will be joined by Dr. Sarah Kapnick, Managing Director, Global Head of Climate Advisory, J.P. Morgan, who brings a unique vantage point from her work advising boards, executives, investors, and financial institutions on climate risk.

Drawing on these interactions, Sarah will share the key trends she is seeing emerge for 2026 and 2027, including how physical climate risk is increasingly discussed in plain financial terms and embedded into strategic, governance, and capital allocation decisions. The conversation will offer a forward-looking perspective on how leading institutions are moving from understanding climate risk to acting on it in real-world investment decisions.

Reflect on the day’s insights with peers and the First Street team. We’ll close with a look ahead to how CRFM continues to evolve and how collective adoption can make actionable climate data a standard feature of modern finance.