Per Jacobsson Lecture

Climate finance is a very broad and very fast-growing area. Until very recently, it was actually quite rare to hear people talking about terms like “unburnable carbon” and “stranded assets” in relation to climate change, except if they were green activists or academics. The idea of a major corporate green bond was still pretty much unheard of, and central bank governors rarely talked in terms of climate change and financial instability. Though a great deal has changed since then, a great deal more needs to change. Climate finance needs to become much more mainstream than it is if there’s to be any hope of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. The 2017 Per Jacobsson Lecture, a panel discussion on the financial and economic consequences of climate change, looks briefly at how we got to where we are, then at what needs to come next. It featured, as panelists, Mark Carney, Chair of the Financial Stability Board and Governor of the Bank of England; Maureen Cropper, Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland; Ashley Schulten, Head of Responsible Investing for Global Fixed Income at BlackRock; and Nicholas Stern, I. G. Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics and Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.