Why JPMorgan hired NOAA’s Sarah Kapnick as chief climate scientist

Sarah Kapnick started her career in 2004 as an investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs. She was struck almost immediately by the overlap of financial growth and climate change, and the lack of client advisory around that theme.

Integrating the two, she thought, would help investors understand both the risks and opportunities, and would help them use climate information in finance and business operations. With a degree in theoretical mathematics and geophysical fluid dynamics, Kapnick saw herself as uniquely positioned to take on that challenge.

But first, she had to get deeper into the science.

That led her to more study and then to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the nation’s scientific and regulatory agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. Its defined mission is to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts and to share that knowledge and information with others.

In 2022, Kapnick was appointed NOAA’s chief scientist. Two years later, JPMorgan Chase

hired her away, but not as chief sustainability officer, a role common at most large investment banks around the world and a position already filled at JPMorgan.

Rather, Kapnick is JPMorgan’s global head of climate advisory, a unique job she envisioned back in 2004.

Just days before the official start of the North American hurricane season, CNBC spoke with Kapnick from her office at JPMorgan in New York about her current role at the bank and how she’s advising and warning clients.

Here’s the Q&A: 

(This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.) 

Diana Olick, CNBC: Why does JPMorgan need you?

Sarah Kapnick, JPMorgan global head of climate advisory: JPMorgan and banks need climate expertise because there is client demand for understanding climate change, understanding how it affects businesses, and understanding how to plan. Clients want to understand how to create frameworks for thinking about climate change, how to think about it strategically, how to think about it in terms of their operations, how to think about it in terms of their diversification and their long-term business plans.

Everybody’s got a chief sustainability officer. You are not that. What is the difference?

The difference is, I come with a deep background in climate science, but also how that climate science translates into business, into the economy. Working at NOAA for most of my career, NOAA is a science agency, but it’s science agency under the Department of Commerce. And so my job was to understand the future due to physics, but then be able to translate into what does that mean for the economy? What does that mean for economic development? What does that mean for economic output, and how do you use that science to be able to support the future of commerce? So I have this deep thinking that combines all that science, all of that commerce thinking, that economy, how it translates into national security. And so it wraps up all these different issues that…