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What We Do

Delivering a commercially smart climate transition

To reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the world must halve its emissions in this decade. While climate ambition is growing, we remain significantly off track to deliver on this goal.

It is time to turn climate intent into action.

Corporations need to transition at pace and at scale, and within the normal pressures of sustaining and growing a profitable business.

Oliver Wyman helps clients to pursue a commercially smart transition, enabling leadership teams to deploy their financing, operating capabilities and customer relationships to achieve outcomes for which they were never designed.

We bring together deep industry and functional expertise from across Oliver Wyman, the Oliver Wyman Forum, and Marsh McLennan to break down climate transition challenges and bring a competitive edge to clients.

Through our conversations with practitioners and our consulting work, we have identified four domains that businesses need to manage in order for their transition plans to be both commercially successful and to have impact.

Our Approach

Our Collaborations

CDP Europe

Oliver Wyman and CDP Europe have published five major reports analysing the progress and shortfalls of Europe's path to net zero, drawing on CDP's comprehensive self-reported environmental data and Oliver Wyman's analytical rigour. The strategic insights and corporate case studies highlighted in these reports can help senior executives understand and act on their climate and nature-related impacts.

Glasgow Financial Alliance For Net Zero

Oliver Wyman served as the knowledge partner to the GFANZ Secretariat. Since launching in 2021, more than 450 financial firms, from 45 countries, responsible for more than $130 trillion in financial assets, have committed to aligning their operations and financing with achieving 1.5°C. GFANZ has published five major reports which help financial institutions translate their net zero pledges into actionable, near-term and science-based transition plans.

World Economic Forum

Oliver Wyman is supporting the World Economic Forum as a knowledge partner on a broad range of initiatives including, Financing the Transition to a Net Zero Future, Sector Transitions to Nature Positive, and the Partnership for Advancing Health in Climate Action. These initiatives have engaged a multistakeholder community of financiers, industry stakeholders, philanthropists and public institutions to unlock opportunities for a net zero and nature-positive future.

UNEP Finance Initiative

Oliver Wyman worked with UNEP FI to develop common analytical tools – including scenarios, methodologies and metrics – for banks to strengthen their assessment and disclosure of climate-related risks and opportunities. This will enhance their ability to implement the TCFD recommendations and promote consistency and comparability in climate change assessments and disclosures across the sector.

Our Climate Breakthroughs

Climate Credit Analytics

In July 2020, Oliver Wyman joined forces with S&P Global Market Intelligence to launch a first-of-its-kind climate credit solution to help financial institutions assess counterparty risk from a transition to a low-carbon economy. These tools combine S&P Global Market Intelligence’s data resources and credit analytics capabilities with Oliver Wyman’s climate scenario and stress-testing expertise. Climate Credit Analytics translates climate scenarios into drivers of financial performance tailored to each industry, such as production volumes, fuel costs and capex spending.

Partnering For A Green Transition

Oliver Wyman worked with a major steel manufacturer and a large multi-utility company to define a partnership to drive the green transition. The main objective for the manufacturer was to accelerate transition to carbon neutrality and improve the sustainability of its production process. The goal of the multiutility was to support the manufacturer in its green transition on three main work streams. For each work stream, Oliver Wyman provided a diagnostic assessment, industry benchmark and project management. The result was that both parties agreed to a long-term power purchase agreement and targeting a 20% reduction in Scope 2 emissions by 2023.

Forecasting Biofuels Demand

Oliver Wyman supported a European oil and gas company with forecasting their biofuels demand in the next 10-15 years, mapping which types of feedstock would be in demand and where the demand would come from. Oliver Wyman brought its deep understanding of biofuels value chains and scarcity of sourcing feedstocks as well as practical experience in the field to bring more clarity and confidence to the client with regard to the amount of capacity that that they should invest into – underpinned by future demand. What made this project unique was that the strategy had optionality regarding the use of technology for use in future product mixes.

Innovative Financing Solutions

Oliver Wyman worked with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), to develop a unique fund that leverages the environmental benefits of reforestation and cookstove projects to generate income on the rising carbon credit market. The innovative financing solution will enable the delivery of social and environmental impact at unprecedented scale and duration, saving millions of trees per year, providing much needed income to refugees and host communities.

Climate Vulnerability Assessment

Oliver Wyman helped a leading Australian bank develop climate risk assessment models for its largest clients. This was required as part of new supervisory guidelines and climate reporting requirements, and required estimating changes in client risk levels over a range of 30 year climate scenarios. We used our approaches developed over several years with global banks and tailored them to the bank’s clients and the Australian economy. The models give our client a new way to quantify climate risk for its largest clients, which will enable it to better assess and price risk as climate risks increase.

Setting Ambitious Climate Targets

Oliver Wyman helped a large Asian general insurer set an ambitious green transition strategy. The client wanted to understand the current global trends and gaps in the climate and insurance landscape to move faster and further on climate. Through interviews with global experts and an extensive peer benchmarking study, we assisted the client with setting mid/long-term targets for GHG emissions reductions and identifying strategic priorities for action.

What We Think

With sustainability and climate change impacting businesses across virtually all sectors, there are a variety of trends that leaders should be aware of as they outline their approach to this pressing topic.