ECGI Blog Review Vol. 3: Governance & Climate Change

Introducing the ECGI Blog Review Vol.3, featuring the full collection of articles from the ‘Governance & Climate Change’ theme.

In this ECGI Blog series, which ran from February to August 2023, we tackled one of the hottest topics in governance and industry; "Climate Change". As the world grapples with the ongoing challenges of climate change, our theme explores the pivotal questions that boardrooms across the globe will have to address in the years ahead. This high-level collection of articles offers the latest insights and analyses on this crucial topic, helping to shape the discourse and action around climate governance. We extend our gratitude to our guest editors, Harald Walkate (University of Zurich CSP) and Thom Wetzer (University of Oxford), for curating this thought-provoking series of expert perspectives from leading academics, practitioners, and policy makers.

Read the digital version or download the pdf.

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SERIES EDITOR'S NOTE

It has become a cliché to say that climate change is the defining issue of our time. Which does not make it less true.

But while the history of climate science is already long – scientists were already studying the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in the late 19th century, and started ringing climate alarm bells in the 1970s and 80s – the issue only rose up the corporate and investor agenda in the mid-2010s.

Still, this has given corporate boardrooms and fund managers about a decade to take a position on this defining issue.

However, the corporate and investor climate change debate today – what there is of it – is a rather hopeless jumble of net zero commitments, TCFD reports, stress tests, decarbonization plans, and emissions disclosures. Often it remains unclear what the underlying objectives of these initiatives are, whether it be signalling virtue, managing business and investment risk, identifying business opportunities, contributing to climate action, or perhaps a combination of all of four.

This series of ECGI blog posts, under the theme of “Governance and Climate Change”, is designed to showcase a broad range of perspectives on how managers and investors can think about the impact of climate change on business, by highlighting and summarizing the climate science; by discussing the technological, economic and political aspects of the energy transition that we will need to engineer to mitigate climate change; by discussing what the likely business and investment implications are of these scientific, technological, economic and political insights and developments; and, finally, by presenting a number of tools that corporate managers and investment managers alike can use to take action.
 

~ Harald   

Harald Walkate is a Senior Fellow at the University of Zurich Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP), a member of the ESG Advisory Committee of the Financial Conduct Authority (UK) and a founding partner of Route17, an independent blended finance advisory firm. 

The ECGI Blog is part of the Responsible Capitalism initiative. 

The ECGI does not, consistent with its constitutional purpose, have a view or opinion. If you wish to respond to any of the articles featured in the Blog Review, you can submit a blog article or 'letter to the editor' by clicking here.