Not logged in.

Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Accounting for finance is key for climate mitigation pathways
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Stefano Battiston
  • Irene Monasterolo
  • Keywan Riahi
  • Bas J van Ruijven
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Science
Publisher American Association for the Advancement of Science
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0036-8075
Volume 372
Number 6545
Page Range 918 - 920
Date 2021
Abstract Text The financial system-the ecosystem of investors (e.g., banks, investment funds, insurance), markets, and instruments-is often considered to play an enabling role in climate mitigation pathways to a low-carbon transition (1). But it can also have a hampering role, e.g., if investors' perceptions of low risk from a missed transition and low opportunities from a transition fail to trigger a reallocation of capital into low-carbon investments. This increases the chance of the transition not occurring within the time window required to stabilize the climate or occurring in a disorderly fashion. Indeed investors, who can influence the realization of climate mitigation pathways, themselves rely on estimates of climate mitigation pathways from process-based integrated assessment models (IAMs) (2). And IAMs do not model the financial system or investors' decisions; thus, the feedback loop between the financial system and mitigation pathways is not taken into account, neither by the IAMs nor by the finance community. This limitation to our understanding of the dynamics and the feasibility of the low-carbon transition weakens the ability of IAMs to inform policy and investment decisions. We propose a framework to capture the interdependence between investors' perception of future climate risk, depending on the credibility of climate policies, and the allocation of investments in the economy.
Free access at DOI
Official URL https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abf3877
Digital Object Identifier 10.1126/science.abf3877
Other Identification Number merlin-id:21077
Export BibTeX
EP3 XML (ZORA)