Seeing climate risk on your loan book

Floods, drought, and extreme heat hit the locations where branches sit and borrowers work, and therefore the loans tied to them. In climate-vulnerable markets this is no longer a tail scenario; it is a recurring driver of PAR, restructures, and write-offs.

• The 2022 Sindh floods alone added an estimated $271M in microfinance NPLs, more than half the industry’s entire capital reserves.
• Exposure is concentrated by geography: a handful of branches in a flood corridor can carry a disproportionate share of expected loss.
• Today most lenders cannot see this in one place. It is spread across branch lists, local knowledge, and hindsight.

The reflex to freeze lending in climate-hit sectors leaves an institution more exposed, not less. It starves recovering borrowers of the liquidity that would let them rebuild and repay, and concentrates the surviving book in the same fragile segments.

• In Pakistan, roughly 40% of MFIs cut or stopped lending to climate-hit sectors after recent shocks.
• A client’s resilience and the institution’s resilience move together: when borrowers recover faster, portfolio quality recovers with them.

Independent research and Atram’s own field data point the same direction: acting before and immediately after a shock materially improves recovery.

• CFI studied 800+ women entrepreneurs in Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa: those who received early warnings recovered far faster, associated with a ~37% increase in rapid recovery, after controlling for education, experience, financial access, and shock severity.
• Atram’s Kenya deployment shows the same pattern on the balance sheet: based on self-reported figures, between $66 and $130 in avoided loss per well-prepared user, and $650k+ saved across ~10k protected users.
• Liquidity matters most when it lets a borrower act before the shock, not only after.

CFI’s finding is an association, not proof of causation. Atram’s Kenya figures are early-deployment results; further pilots in additional regions are underway to test how the pattern holds across markets.

Atram turns a branch network into a ranked picture of physical climate exposure using public hazard data and your branch list: no complex integration, no consultant, no six-month engagement. A portfolio manager can run it directly and get an interactive view of where risk sits.

• Every branch scored for flood, drought, and extreme-rainfall exposure.
• A clear split of the network into high, medium, and low risk, with the dominant hazards and most-exposed regions surfaced.
• A simulator for how a given weather event would move the portfolio.
• A board-ready exposure and preparedness report you can take to a risk or credit committee.

The assessment is designed to feed the decisions a portfolio manager already owns: where to set exposure limits, which regions warrant closer monitoring, how to price and structure in high-hazard corridors, and how to sequence outreach before a forecasted event.

• It aligns with the four-step arc widely recommended for FSPs (strategy, risk assessment, risk financing, product) and operationalises the first steps you can act on today.
• Borrower-level climate credit scoring and portfolio expected-loss modelling are on the roadmap, building on the same branch-level foundation.

Credibility depends on claiming only what is live. The branch-level exposure assessment, event simulator, and board-ready report are available now for feedback and have been used by design-partner institutions on their own portfolios. Risk layering, borrower-level climate credit scoring, and portfolio expected loss based on forecasted climate events are next, in upcoming releases.

Climate exposure is now something you can quantify and rank before it shows up as PAR. The first move is not a new lending policy: it is a clear map of where hazard and portfolio concentration overlap. From there, decisions about limits, monitoring, and pre-event outreach become evidence-based rather than reactive.

Run a first-pass assessment on your own branch network and see where climate risk sits across the portfolio.