A Case Study of the Impact of Climate Change on Agricultural Loan Credit Risk

Changing weather patterns may impose increased risk to the creditworthiness of financial institutions in the agriculture sector. To reduce the credit risk caused by climate change, financial institutions need to update their agricultural lending portfolios to consider climate change scenarios. In this paper we introduce a framework to compute the optimal agricultural lending portfolio under different increased temperature scenarios. In this way we quantify the impact of increased temperature, taken as a measure of climate change, on credit risk. We provide a detailed case study of how our approach applies to the problem of optimizing a portfolio of agricultural loans made to corn farmers across different corn producing regions of Ontario, Canada, under various climate change scenarios. We conclude that the lending portfolio obtained by taking into account the climate change is less risky than the lending portfolio neglecting climate change.