As a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Armin Haas is interested in the interaction of financial markets and climate change. Climate Change will have severe implications for financial markets by impacting both physical and financial assets. The other way round, financial markets control the investment streams that determine the future energy system and the supply of consumption goods. Thus, they have a crucial influence on the level of carbon use and subsequently climate change to come.

Armin is leading the research group “Bayesian Risk Solutions” and he is the speaker of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) project EYES on science-based stakeholder dialogues. He is co-founder of the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII), the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative. Together with two colleagues from PIK, he has founded TheCompensators* for compensating personal CO2 emissions via the ETS.

Bayesian Risk Solutions

Armin is leading the research group “Bayesian Risk Solutions” (BRS). BRS is a joint initiative of PIK, the University of Potsdam, the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), and the Global Climate Forum. The BRS team develops and applies Bayesian methods for managing climate risks.
Climate change is a challenge for risk management as it influences both the frequency and the magnitude of extreme weather events like storms, heat waves, floods, and droughts. Climate change thus devalues the statistics of the past that are the basic input for standard risk assessment. Bayesian methods are promising tools for tackling this challenge. Moreover, they also enable to manage the regulatory risks of climate change, i.e. the risk financial market actors bear in regard to socio-political regulations triggered by climate change. The current core activity of the BRS group is the BMBF-funded project “Mainstreaming climate risks and changes in the financial sector”.