Responsible Investor Webinar with Ulrich Volz on “Central Banks, ESG Integration & the ...

9 February 2020

SOAS Centre for Sustainable Finance Director Ulrich Volz spoke at a Responsible Investor webinar on “Central banks, ESG integration & the future of green monetary policy”. Ulrich highlighted the responsibility of central banks in addressing climate-related financial risks to safeguard financial and macroeconomic stability and emphasised that current mandates already provide a lot of room for action, not only with respect to monetary and prudential policy but also regarding policies aimed at scaling up sustainable finance. He pointed to recent research on Central Bank Mandates, Sustainability Objectives and the Promotion of Green Finance which showed that in a sample of 135 central banks, 12% have explicit sustainability mandates, while another 40% are mandated to support the government’s policy priorities, which in most cases include sustainability goals. However, given that climate risks can directly affect central banks’ traditional core responsibilities, most notably monetary and financial stability, even central banks without explicit or implicit sustainability objectives ought to incorporate climate-related physical and transition risks into their core policy implementation frameworks in order to efficiently and successfully safeguard macro-financial stability.

A recording of the webinar with presentations and background material is available online: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14001/374480 .