A new UCL framework enables shipowners and financiers to assess vessels' exposure to future climate transition risks. File Image / Pixabay

UCL Energy Institute has developed a new framework designed to assess how individual ships could perform under a range of future climate policy and market scenarios, helping owners, charterers and financiers better evaluate long-term transition risk.

Unlike existing tools that rely largely on historic emissions and current compliance, the Climate Resilience Framework assesses vessels across 384 combinations of regulatory, fuel price and technology cost scenarios, UCL said in an emailed report on Thursday. 

It has been tested on more than 2,000 commercial vessels using data from the Clarksons World Fleet Register.

The framework applies real option theory to account for a ship's ability to adapt through fuel switching, retrofits or deferred investment.

UCL said retrofit-ready conventional and LNG dual-fuel vessels, particularly those equipped with wind propulsion, currently show lower climate transition risk under uncertain IMO policy outcomes.

“Existing assessments typically rely on a limited set of scenarios and don't capture the value of flexibility under uncertainty,” Dr. Marie Fricaudet, Senior Research Fellow at UCL Shipping and Oceans Research Group and lead author, said.

“The UCL framework offers something we haven't seen before: a consistent, transparent basis for comparing how different design and fuel choices perform across the full range of plausible futures,” Sophie-Kim Chapman, VP, Decarbonisation and Energy Security at DFDS, said.

The researchers said the tool is intended to support investment and financing decisions and will undergo further industry review ahead of its planned release in the coming months.

The full report can be found here.