Can financial disclosure of climate risk accelerate climate action?
The Covid-19 pandemic could be a dry run for future impacts of climate change, with challenging and unprecedented situations requiring rapid and aggressive responses worldwide. A proactive approach to climate change aimed at minimizing such impacts will inevitably involve significant cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and investment in more resilient infrastructure. Although current global mitigation and adaptation efforts are proceeding slowly, one emerging strategy could serve as an accelerant: the financial disclosure of climate risk by companies. Such disclosure, if practiced more widely and consistently, could lower the risks of climate change by redirecting investments away from GHG-emitting activities and pinpointing infrastructure that needs to be made more resilient. Toward that end, the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change engaged dozens of decision-makers in the financial sector and industry in a two-hour panel discussion on climate-related financial risk. Held as a Zoom meeting on March...