Finance Watch

Fossil fuel lending is a financial stability issue

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The decline of fossil fuels systems is not only a threat to investor returns but also to financial stability. The NGO Finance Watch believes this should have implications for the way banks are regulated and urges regulators to use their powers to intervene without delay.

N.b.: This is an extract of an article by Greg Ford that was first published on 10 August 2020 at Environmental Finance. To access the full article, please click here.

“Tackling the impact of climate change on financial stability is a realistic and increasingly urgent objective; the last thing that a warming planet needs is another financial crisis. Given the enormous impact on human societies, the cost of measures to break the climate finance doom loop is rather moderate. This is not to say that those measures will not hurt some private interests in the short term but, with all the understanding that one can have for private actors defending their profitability, there is no doubt that the public interest calls for action and that it is the duty of policy-makers to take it, especially when they have the possibility and the tools to do so.”

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