Margarita Delgado: Sustainable finance as the driving force of the ecological transition

Speech by Ms Margarita Delgado, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Spain, at the Roundtable "Sustainable finance as the driving force of the ecological transition", Madrid, 12 March 2019.

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

It is a pleasure for me to welcome you to the Banco de España for two reasons. First, because I believe the Bank should be a forum for discussing and bringing closer to society those financial matters that bear on and affect the well-being of all. The second reason has to do with the matter I shall broach today, which I consider to be particularly important and which is none other than the role finances can and should play in relation to combating climate change.

As you all know, this is not a new objective. Indeed, at least since the 1992 Río de Janeiro United Nations summit, combating climate change has been a recurrent objective of international institutions. So, what has changed in the wake of the 2015 Paris agreement, and why has climate change also begun to be part of the financial authorities' agenda?

Mark Carney talked about the so-called "tragedy of the horizon", in the sense that the horizons used in the evaluation of financial risks are shorter than those that should be applied to evaluate climate change. Yet these risks may be said to have moved onto our horizon; both the physical risks owing to the effects of climate change, and above all, the risks of transition towards a sustainable economy.