This publication serves as a roadmap for exploring and managing climate risk in the U.S. financial system. It is the first major climate publication by a U.S. financial regulator. The central message is that U.S. financial regulators must recognize that climate change poses serious emerging risks to the U.S. financial system, and they should move urgently and decisively to measure, understand, and address these risks. Achieving this goal calls for strengthening regulators’ capabilities, expertise, and data and tools to better monitor, analyze, and quantify climate risks. It calls for working closely with the private sector to ensure that financial institutions and market participants do the same. And it calls for policy and regulatory choices that are flexible, open-ended, and adaptable to new information about climate change and its risks, based on close and iterative dialogue with the private sector. At the same time, the financial community should not simply be reactive—it should provide solutions. Regulators should recognize that the financial system can itself be a catalyst for investments that accelerate economic resilience and the transition to a net-zero emissions economy. Financial innovations, in the form of new financial products, services, and technologies, can help the U.S. economy better manage climate risk and help channel more capital into technologies essential for the transition. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5247742
This report provides an assessment of how governments can generate inclusive economic growth in the short term, while making progress towards climate goals to secure sustainable long-term growth. It describes the development pathways required to meet the Paris Agreement objectives.
The tools and information that build effective compliance programs Enterprise Compliance Risk Management: An Essential Toolkit for Banks and Financial Services is a comprehensive narrative on managing compliance and compliance risk that enables value creation for financial services firms. Compliance risk management, a young, evolving yet intricate discipline, is occupying center stage owing to the interplay between the ever increasing complexity of financial services and the environmental effort to rein it in. The book examines the various facets of this layered and nuanced subject. Enterprise Compliance Risk Management elevates the context of compliance from its current reactive stance to how a proactive strategy can create a clear differentiator in a largely undifferentiated market and become a powerful competitive weapon for organizations. It presents a strong case as to why it makes immense business sense to weave active compliance into business model and strategy through an objective view of the cost benefit analysis. Written from a real-world perspective, the book moves the conversation from mere evangelizing to the operationalizing a positive and active compliance management program in financial services. The book is relevant to the different stakeholders of the compliance universe - financial services firms, regulators, industry bodies, consultants, customers and compliance professionals owing to its coverage of the varied aspects of compliance. Enterprise Compliance Risk Management includes a direct examination of compliance risk, including identification, measurement, mitigation, monitoring, remediation, and regulatory dialogue. With unique hands-on tools including processes, templates, checklists, models, formats and scorecards, the book provides the essential toolkit required by the practitioners to jumpstart their compliance initiatives. Financial services professionals seeking a handle on this vital and growing discipline can find the information they need in Enterprise Compliance Risk Management. Enterprise Compliance Risk Management: An Essential Toolkit for Banks and Financial Services is a comprehensive narrative on managing compliance and compliance risk that enables value creation for financial services firms. Compliance risk management, a young, evolving yet intricate discipline, is occupying center stage owing to the interplay between the ever increasing complexity of financial services and the environmental effort to rein it in. The book examines the various facets of this layered and nuanced subject. Enterprise Compliance Risk Management elevates the context of compliance from its current reactive stance to how a proactive strategy can create a clear differentiator in a largely undifferentiated market and become a powerful competitive weapon for organizations. It presents a strong case as to why it makes immense business sense to weave active compliance into business model and strategy through an objective view of the cost benefit analysis. Written from a real-world perspective, the book moves the conversation from mere evangelizing to the operationalizing a positive and active compliance management program in financial services. The book is relevant to the different stakeholders of the compliance universe - financial services firms, regulators, industry bodies, consultants, customers and compliance professionals owing to its coverage of the varied aspects of compliance. Enterprise Compliance Risk Management includes a direct examination of compliance risk, including identification, measurement, mitigation, monitoring, remediation, and regulatory dialogue. With unique hands-on tools including processes, templates, checklists, models, formats and scorecards, the book provides the essential toolkit required by the practitioners to jumpstart their compliance initiatives. Financial services professionals seeking a handle on this vital and growing discipline can find the information they need in Enterprise Compliance Risk Management.
Climate change is a major problem, generating both risks and opportunities that will have a direct impact on the economy and the financial sector. In recent years, climate change has threatened both the survival of the financial system and economic development. The growing occurrence of extreme climate events combined with the imprudent nature of economic growth can cause unsustainable levels of harm to the financial sectors. On the other hand, it presents a range of new business challenges. In contrast to the most evident physical risks, companies are vulnerable to transformational risks that arise from the reaction of society to climate change, such as technological change, regulation and markets that can boost the cost of doing business, threats to the profitability of existing goods, or effects on the value of the asset. Climate change also offers new business opportunities, and it has made research in the context of a sustainable financial sector indispensable. The Handbook of Research on Climate Change and the Sustainable Financial Sector focuses on the impacts of climate change on various sectors of the world economy. This book covers how businesses can improve their sustainability, the impact of climate change on the financial sector, and specifically, the impacts on financial services, supply chains, and the socio-economic status of the world. Beyond focusing on the impacts to the financial industry itself, this book assesses how climate change in the financial sector affects the well-being of society in areas such as unemployment, economic recessions, decreases in consumer purchases, and more. This book is essential for stockbrokers, business managers, directors, fund managers, financial analysts, consultants and actuaries, institutional investors, policymakers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in a comprehensive view of the impact of climate change on the financial sector.
Mastering climate change has been recognised as a major challenge for the current decade. Besides the physical risks of climate change, the accompanying economic risks are substantial. Carbon Finance: A Risk Management View provides an in-depth analysis of how climate change will affect all aspects of financial markets and how mathematical and statistical methods can be used to analyse, model and manage the ensuing financial risks. There is a focus on the transition risk (termed carbon risk), but also a discussion of the impact of physical risks (as these risks are closely entangled) on the way to low carbon economies. This is a valuable overview for readers seeking an analysis of carbon risks from the perspective of financial risk management, utilising quantitative risk management tools.
Confronting Climate Uncertainty in Water Resources Planning and Project Design describes an approach to facing two fundamental and unavoidable issues brought about by climate change uncertainty in water resources planning and project design. The first is a risk assessment problem. The second relates to risk management. This book provides background on the risks relevant in water systems planning, the different approaches to scenario definition in water system planning, and an introduction to the decision-scaling methodology upon which the decision tree is based. The decision tree is described as a scientifically defensible, repeatable, direct and clear method for demonstrating the robustness of a project to climate change. While applicable to all water resources projects, it allocates effort to projects in a way that is consistent with their potential sensitivity to climate risk. The process was designed to be hierarchical, with different stages or phases of analysis triggered based on the findings of the previous phase. An application example is provided followed by a descriptions of some of the tools available for decision making under uncertainty and methods available for climate risk management. The tool was designed for the World Bank but can be applicable in other scenarios where similar challenges arise.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of this century. Mitigation requires a large-scale transition to a low-carbon economy. This paper provides an overview of the rapidly growing literature on the role of macroeconomic and financial policy tools in enabling this transition. The literature provides a menu of policy tools for mitigation. A key conclusion is that fiscal tools are first in line and central, but can and may need to be complemented by financial and monetary policy instruments. Some tools and policies raise unanswered questions about policy tool assignment and mandates, which we describe. The literature is scarce, however, on the most effective policy mix and the role of mitigation tools and goals in the overall policy framework.
Banks, like other businesses, endeavor to drive revenue and growth, while deftly managing the risks. Dubbed the next "frontier" in risk management for financial services, climate related risks are the newest and potentially the most challenging set of risks that banks are encountering. On the one hand, banks must show their commitment to becoming net zero and, on the other, help their customers transition to more sustainable operations, all this while managing climate-related financial risks. It is a paradigm shift from how the banking industry has traditionally managed risks as climate change risks are complex. They are multilayered, multidimensional with uncertain climate pathways that impact real economy which in turn influences the financial ecosystem in myriad ways. Climate Change Risk Management in Banks weaves the complete lifecycle of climate risk management from strategy to disclosures, a must-read for academics, banking professionals and other stakeholders interested in understanding and managing climate change risk. It provides much-needed insights, enabling organizations to respond well to these new risks, protect their businesses, mitigate losses and enhance brand value. Saloni Ramakrishna, an acknowledged financial industry practitioner, argues that given the uncertain and volatile climate paths, complex geopolitical patterns, and sustainability challenges, banks and business professionals will benefit from a wholistic approach to managing climate change risks. The book provides a blueprint and a cohesive framework for embracing and maintaining such an approach, in a simple and structured format.
There are demands on central banks and financial regulators to take on new responsibilities for supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy. Regulators can indeed facilitate the reorientation of financial flows necessary for the transition. But their powers should not be overestimated. Their diagnostic and policy toolkits are still in their infancy. They cannot (and should not) expand their mandate unilaterally. Taking on these new responsibilities can also have potential pitfalls and unintended consequences. Ultimately, financial regulators cannot deliver a low-carbon economy by themselves and should not risk being caught again in the role of ‘the only game in town.’
Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.
