Integration of financial sector vital for resilience building
IN THE face of a changing climate, environmental risk management professional Eleanor Jones has put the weight of her voice behind the call to deepen the integration of the financial sector into resilience building.
“Multilaterals are already putting money into the management of climate risk. We need some of the private banks to do that as well. For example, the Asian Development Bank said that 75 per cent of their portfolio includes climate risk,” she noted, referencing information from her recent participation in the international climate talks, held in Katowice, Poland.
“It is very important for our financial sector here to begin to take that on board, to incorporate climate risk in their evaluation of investments – and not just using a little check list. It needs to be more than ticking off those selected criteria; it needs to be a wholesome, fulsome programme, integrating it with their project cycle and programmes,” added Jones, the managing director and consulting principal at Environmental Solutions Limited.
SUSTAINABILITY
At the same time, she said her participation at the Poland talks as a private-sector representative on the Jamaica delegation had helped to cement in her own mind the fact that this integration of the financial sector should not be seen as a hurdle to investment, but rather, as enabling to the sustainability of investments.
“We want to see it as the banks paying attention to their borrowers taking on climate risk and risk reduction, as part of efforts to build resilience and, in particular, to make investments climate resilient, ”Jones said.
The talks, meanwhile, yielded the socalled rulebook of the Paris Agreement, reflecting guidelines that will define how climate action is implemented, and accounted for, in the future.
While there is still some work to be done, the document currently entails, among other things, the process for establishing new finance targets from 2025 onwards to support developing countries; as well as how to assess progress on the development and transfer of technology.
How to conduct the ‘global stock-take’ of the effectiveness of climate action in 2023, in addition to loss and damage associated with climate change are also included.