Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Nina Eichacker, University of Rhode Island

; Kardelen Günaydin, University of Osnabrück

Description:

In recent years, central banks and institutions of global economic governance have become increasingly preoccupied with climate change as a discrete threat to financial stability. Financial stability risks promulgated by climate change are generally categorized into two kinds, namely physical risks and transition risks. Physical risks -such as weather events or catastrophes- directly impact society and the economy while the transition risks are those financial losses that could be incurred as governments implement policies aiming to bring about a transition towards low carbon emissions economies. This impetus to govern climate change and manage climate transitions as a financial stability problem sits awkwardly with a global financial system that is intrinsically dependent on a “climate changing capitalism” and the “translation of carbon into financial value” (Bryant, 2019; Bridge et al,2020). Decades of the aggressive financialization of nature and the “circulation of finance in and through nature” mean that the task, scale and scope of financial climate transitions is seemingly endless (Ouma et al., 2018).

Economic geographers have already begun to address this issue. On the one hand, work attending to the role of public institutions has highlighted the role of central bankers as “climate governors of last resort”, the “green structural adjustment” of the international organizations of global economic governance and government backed flood reinsurance schemes (Christophers, 2019a; Langley and Morris, 2020; Bigger and Webber, 2021). What such scholarship currently reveals is that climate governance instantiates “neoliberal modalities of governance” through a preoccupation with improved assessments of climate change risk to which state and market actors are exposed (Christophers, 2017). On the other hand, economic geography has already extended our understanding of how institutional investors, insurers, and reinsurers continue to organize nature via securitized catastrophe risk (Johnson, 2013, 2014; Christophers, 2019b; Taylor, 2020; Langley et al., 2021). In the context of climate change and financial stability, market actors continue to provide private forms of climate governance in the form of risk fixes such as the securitization of catastrophe risk, investment in low-carbon activities and divestment from high-carbon firms.

That said, there are many facets of the challenge of climate finance transitions and its governance that require further exploration from geographical scholarship. In this session, we bring together papers that seek to extend geographical understandings of how public and private actors are contributing to, or obstructing, climate finance transitions and the financial stability risks threatened by climate change. The papers address themes such as the prospects for, and limits to, climate risk disclosure, ESG ratings and greenwashing, the role of securitization in the management of physical and/or transition risk, the problem of stranded assets, climate based forms of risk and uncertainty and green central banking.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda