Green Central Banking

When the team at Climate & Capital Media – Green Central Banking’s partner site – first started writing these lists of climate change related books four years ago, there were few new books to review. Now there are many and the number seems to be constantly growing. So here’s the list of recommended fiction and nonfiction books that address the issue of climate change and our efforts to address it. Juice by Tim Winton. Set in the nearly unlivable, overheated future, Juice is all about climate justice. What If We Get It Right by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Is there an antidote to rising climate anxiety? Author and scientist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson thinks so. In a literary landscape often saturated with environmental despair, her book emerges as a beacon of transformative optimism. The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It by Genevieve Guenther, PhD. Want to understand how the fossil fuel industry has been bullshitting you and why it is so effective? Genevieve Guenther’s soon-to-be-released book is for you. Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change by M V Ramana. Ramana exposes the truth lost in the fantasies of Bill Gates and other nuclear renaissance proponents. He meticulously exposes the economic black hole of the nuclear infrastructure. Green Is the New Red by Will Potter. Will Potter’s Green Is the New Red raises an important question as America braces for Trump 2.0. Should you be put in jail for protesting against environmental and climate destruction? 600ppm: A Novel of Climate Change by Clarke W Owens. In 600ppm, Clarke W Owens envisions a harrowing future where the climate crisis has fully unfolded. Set in 2051, the novel depicts a United States fractured by environmental collapse. Plastic by Scott Guild. Plastic is at once dystopian and hopeful, futuristic and yet oddly real, right now, in this age of climate crisis and plastic everywhere around us. Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The Booker Prize’s first novel set in space, Orbital is a stunningly-written homage to earth. Six astronauts from five countries orbit our planet on board the international space station 16 times a day. Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Place in the Universe by Jeremy Rifkin. In his latest environmental discourse, Jeremy Rifkin shatters conventional wisdom with Planet Aqua, a radical manifesto that reframes our understanding of the planet. Rifkin argues that we have critically misunderstood our planetary home, viewing it as a land planet when it is, in fact, fundamentally a water planet. Navigating the Polycrisis: Mapping the Futures of Capitalism and the Earth by Michael J. Albert. This book openly reviews our “age of interconnected systemic crises with no clear end in sight”, complete with “deeper challenges … from the climate and mass extinction crises to ­future pandemics” GreenCB.co/3VMssYW #ClimateChange #HolidayBooks

#GreenCentralBanking roundup: 🇬🇲 Joof: a green paradigm shift is needed at the Central Bank of The Gambia ✅ Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) unveils new tools to align finance with net-zero and nature goals 🇴🇲 Oman issues new sustainable finance requirements for banks And more 👇 GreenCB.co/3ZZH89I

The French financial watchdog Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) – France wants banks and insurers to improve their reporting for the European taxonomy classification to promote environmental sustainability, calling current disclosures “dense and difficult to understand”. “The AMF therefore calls on these institutions to continue their efforts to improve transparency by clearly indicating the assumptions made, as well as any difficulties encountered, in particular the reasons for not publishing certain indicators,” it said in a new study. The EU taxonomy is a classification system for identifying economic activities that are environmentally sustainable, but some critics doubt whether the metric will actually help drive change as its scope is limited and there is a general lack of available data. Philippe Ramos, advocacy officer from campaigning group Positive Money Europe, said it was not surprising that there were teething problems with the new system: “The European taxonomy is quite complex and subject to interpretation,” he said. “It’s very difficult for banks to implement.” Read the full story: GreenCB.co/3VKm8B2 #SustainableFinance #EUTaxonomy #TransparencyInFinance #GreenBanking #EnvironmentalSustainability #FinancialRegulation

Inflation around much of the world has returned close to target, but new inflationary risks loom. Many of these risks lie on the supply side of the economy and many are related to climate change, say David Barmes, policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, and Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva former deputy general manager of the Bank for International Settlements – BIS and deputy governor of the Banco Central do Brasil. Exacerbated by other features of the polycrisis, such as environmental degradation and geoeconomic fragmentation, increasingly frequent, severe and persistent climate-induced supply shocks could pose major challenges for inflation-targeting central banks. Monetary policymakers will need innovative approaches to adequately calibrate their policy stance in response. Read more: GreenCB.co/4gytOP6 #ClimateChange #Inflation

G20 countries are making some progress on greening regulatory frameworks but wholesale reform of the global financial system is still needed, say Siti Kholifatul Rizkiah and Maud ABDELLI of WWF. The G20 holds a pivotal role in leading climate and broader environmental action. Its members are responsible for 85% of global GDP and 75% of global emissions, so policies and requirements set by the group will have an impact around the world. The latest edition of Sustainable Financial Regulations and Central Bank Activities (Susreg) assessment – conducted by WWF’s Greening Finance Regulation Initiative – shows how financial regulators, supervisors and central banks within the G20 are integrating climate and environment risks into their financial regulations. Read more: https://lnkd.in/esQPV_uY #SustainableFinance #G20

In an increasingly hot and volatile world, central banks will need innovative approaches to guarantee price stability such as adaptive inflation targeting, say economists David Barmes and Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva. Read more: GreenCB.co/4gytOP6

Developing countries like India need a lot more support from richer countries to help them invest in sustainable technology and adapt to climate change, according to a deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). In a speech at a conference in November, Rajeshwar Rao said the UN Cop29 climate conference held in November had fallen short of the expectations of emerging markets despite a proposal to triple climate finance to US$300bn annually by 2035. “The biggest challenge faced by us and the emerging markets and developing economies is lack of adequate financing for development of sustainable technologies and requisite infrastructure to mitigate and adapt to climate change and build a robust sustainable financial system,” Rao said. Rao said India alone needs funding of around $160bn a year to meet its climate commitments made at Cop26 in 2021. Read more: GreenCB.co/3ZBbeP8 #ClimateJustice #LossAndDamage #Cop29

Professor Ilan Noy - chair in the economics of disasters and climate change at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington - discusses how climate losses threaten the insurance industry and financial stability Read the full story: GreenCB.co/3BiQBiT #ClimateRisk #Insurance #ClimateChange #ExtremeWeather

Insurance markets are already straining under the weight of climate impacts, heralding greater problems for financial stability, says disaster and climate economist Ilan Noy. Read more: https://greencb.co/3BiQBiT

Kuwait's current economic diversification plans may inadvertently increase domestic vulnerability to climate risks, warn researchers at the LSE Middle East Centre in a new paper, “The Climate Change Risk Reduction Trap: Low Carbon Spatial Economic Restructuring and Disaster Risk in Kuwait” Oil-rich Gulf states face a complex challenge: how to pivot away from fossil fuels while avoiding climate risks stemming from economy-wide restructuring. Using Kuwait as a case study, this paper warns that without careful planning attempts to diversify petroleum-based economies could inadvertently increase domestic vulnerability to climate impacts. The Middle East’s petroleum-dependent states are in a precarious economic position, say authors Sara Mehryar, Mohammad Alsahli and Viktor Rözer. With 38% of known oil reserves and 61% of gas reserves, the region has the highest share of assets that will need to be stranded in global decarbonisation efforts, as well as some of the highest per capita emissions globally. Gulf countries where economic development has relied heavily on oil and gas exports are now working to diversify their economies in anticipation of declining fossil fuel demand. This will require them “to entirely restructure their economies compared to indi­vidual sectors in most countries”, states the paper. Read more: GreenCB.co/4gJxuh5 #ClimateRisk #EconomicDiversification #SustainableDevelopment #EnergyTransition