Mindy Lubber, CEO and president of Ceres, perhaps the leading corporate sustainability non-profit focused on building business support for acting on climate, announced the issuance of a major report on climate risk by a U.S. financial regulatory agency, recommending that financial regulators act swiftly to address climate change as a systematic financial risk.
The report, “Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System,” was produced by the Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It issues specific recommendations for action, including putting a price on carbon, strengthening climate risk disclosure and conducting stress tests to see how financial institutions like banks might fare in a carbon constrained, rapidly warming world.
This report doesn’t stand alone but joins those issued by Lubber’s Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, outlining the systemic threat climate change poses to capital markets, along with more than 50 recommendations financial regulators should take to combat this threat.
In August, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and colleagues in the Senate issued a major climate report, with significant emphasis on the role financial regulators must play in avoiding severe climate risks to the U.S. economy. They, too, called for mandatory climate risk disclosure, stress tests for banks and cooperation from U.S. financial regulators with their global counterparts who are already engaging on climate change.
Read more at Barron’s: “Finance Experts Are Ringing the Alarm About Climate Change. Will Regulators Listen?”