Seeing the Costs Before They Arrive.

Johannes Wassenberg, founder of Quanturisk Analytics, on what conventional accounting misses, why greenwashing is a market failure, and what it takes to start the journey in the right place.

A binoculars problem

Johannes Wassenberg spent more than two decades at Moody’s, latterly as COO of its ESG Solutions business, where he helped scale a three-person team into a global operation of more than a thousand. He has since founded Quanturisk Analytics, a platform that quantifies the financial costs of environmental risk in language that boards, investors and regulators can act on.

His analogy for what Quanturisk does is precise. Most companies, he says, are equipped to see the horizon, but not beyond it.

“They’re using binoculars at the moment, limited in their view to the horizon, and we are giving them a radar screen so they can look beyond the horizon. That gives them the ability to make better decisions when they have long-term capital allocation decisions.”

The costs of climate change, water scarcity and biodiversity loss are accumulating, Johannes argues, but accounting statements were not built to register them. They sit invisible until they transfer onto the balance sheet through an insurance withdrawal, a regulatory penalty, a supply chain disruption, or a competitor who has adapted earlier. His case for taking them seriously is not a moral one.

“It is increasingly going to be forced upon you whether you like it or not. So why would you choose not to see it and therefore be ahead of the curve, rather than be pushed by others when you are just reacting to it and no longer master of your own destiny? For me, it’s a complete logical imperative. It’s nothing about moral argument.”

An economist’s definition

Pressed on what he means by sustainability, Johannes gives an answer that reflects his training rather than the sector’s conventions.

“Sustainability is nothing else than the internalisation of negative externalities.”

If every cost a company imposes on the environment and on society were priced into its inputs and outputs, markets would operate in something close to balance. They do not, because those costs have for decades been displaced elsewhere: into supply chains, into ecosystems, onto future balance sheets. Reducing externalities, in his view, is not opposed to market thinking. It is what allows markets to do their job.

A market failure, not just a communications failure

In this framing, a company that overstates its environmental performance is not only behaving badly. It is corrupting a pricing mechanism.

“You’re claiming you’re doing something that you’re not. You’re claiming that you produce less externalities. You’re basically fooling your stakeholders, whether that’s investors, whether it’s creditors, whether it’s consumers, customers.”

The damage is twofold. The company misleads the people relying on its disclosures, and in doing so, it degrades the system through which capital, insurance and credit are allocated. Greenwashing, on this reading, is not a reputational risk to be managed. It is a structural problem with measurable consequences.

It is consistent, then, that the discipline Johannes applies to his clients’ externalities he also applies to his own communications.

Green claims debt

Asked why a business approaching launch would commit early to a framework like the Anti-Greenwash Charter, Johannes reaches for an analogy from another field.

“In tech you talk about technical debt, where you basically accept compromises that, for the sake of short-term solutions, you have to revisit, to pay down at some stage. I see this as preventing us from building up green claims debt that we then have to perhaps pedal back on, and that’s going to come back and bite us.”

The phrase green claims debt is his own, and worth keeping. Loose language adopted early is not a free choice. It is a liability that accrues quietly and becomes more expensive to unwind the longer it sits on the books. For a founder building a business whose product depends on transparent methodology and defensible outputs, the calculation is not a sentimental one. It is the same calculation he asks his clients to make about their environmental costs.

The journey

Late in the conversation, Johannes describes a moment from earlier that day. While refreshing a dataset central to Quanturisk’s physical risk modelling, he noticed that the underlying paper had been retracted. He had assumed that a published dataset remained a valid one. The issue was caught in time. Uncaught, it would have damaged the credibility of the analysis.

He raises it not as a misstep to be hidden but as the reason structure matters.

“As much as I want to, I can’t put my hand in the fire on everything we do. We have to take certain risks, but it’s the journey that counts. I just make sure I start the journey at the right place and I have the right guardrails to guide me on that journey.”

No founder can vouch for every detail of a fast-moving business. What a founder can do is begin in the right place, with the right guardrails, and commit to the corrections as honestly as the claims. That, in Johannes’s account, is what serious work on environmental risk requires, and the standard he holds himself to.

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