Climate Change Risk and the Performance of South African Banks

Abstract

The comprehensive climate risk index (CRI) is used to proxy climate change risk in this chapter as an independent variable alongside control variables such as credit risk/nonperforming loan (CRISK), total asset (TA), leverage (LEV), net income margin (NIM), capital adequacy ratio (CAR), yield on earning assets (YEA), and gross domestic product (GDP). Return on assets (ROA) as the response variable was used as proxy for performance of the top six listed South African banks on the Johannesburg stock exchange. Using Stata in a multiple regression technique for the period 2006 to 2019, this chapter concludes that the CRI is negative but not significant enough to impact performance of banks; however, its different individual components such as drought index, rain-waterlogged, etc. could be computed and regressed with other profitability measures to investigate their impact on performance of the banks in future editions of this book.