Unsafe At Any Charge: Why Financial Regulators Should Actively Mitigate Climate-Related Risk

May 26, 2021

Avoiding climate disaster demands an economic transformation unprecedented in speed and scope toward a near-zero emissions economy—a transition that inherently threatens to disrupt financial stability in the absence of timely and effective oversight by financial regulators. Thus far, financial regulators have not taken seriously their role in protecting the financial system from the imminent threat of climate change by guiding the disinvestment in fossil fuel assets that will soon be defunct. Their inaction has been the result of a mischaracterization of climate threats as “risks” to be minimized, rather than as unavoidable harms.