Assessing Nature-Related Financial Risks: The Case of Lithuania

All real economic sectors depend on nature. Accordingly, lending to economic sectors carries some degree of nature-related financial risk. To assess and mitigate the potential impact of ecosystem service loss on financial stability, it is crucial to identify and measure nature-related financial risks. Using FINREP and ENCORE data, we assess the direct material dependence on nature and evaluate physical nature-related financial risks in Lithuanian commercial bank lending. While a substantial share of bank loans (70,1%) in Lithuania goes to sectors that are very highly dependent on at least one ecosystem service, the financial risks arising from hypothetical scenarios of disruption in the provision of some of these ecosystem services is markedly lower than in other European countries due to Lithuania’s geographic specificity. The case study of Lithuania illustrates that the impacts from the loss of ecosystem services are not uniform across geographic regions, that the assumption that the level of dependence on ecosystem services can serve as an approximation of physical nature-related financial risks is inappropriate for certain geographies, and that an accurate assessment of nature-related financial risks requires location-specific dependency-risk mapping matrices.