Frank Elderson: From 1 to 17?

Lecture by Mr Frank Elderson, Executive Director of the Netherlands Bank, at the UNEP Finance Initiative (FI) Positive Impact Finance, Amsterdam, 23 November 2017.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

If you would take a closer look at all the things done, perhaps we can be a bit more critical. So far, most of our climate-risk related work is focused on climate-related risks. We've looked at how the energy transition could impact the economy, we've looked at how the financial sector is at risk from climate change and the energy transition. But being critical, from our supervisory mandate we're mostly just focusing on climate risks. But isn't climate just one of the SDGs? Aren't there 16 other SDGs? And couldn't each of these SDGs have physical or transition risks for our economy and therefore for our financial sector? 

The Principles and the Manifesto pose serious questions for serious times. Questions that we also ask ourselves and that we struggle to answer.