Policy Lever: Upgrading Governance
Examples
Key measures that could be taken include:- Principles: Adopting principles for a sustainable financial system to guide policymaking.
- Policy & Legal Frameworks: Considering impacts on sustainability when developing and reviewing financial regulations, financial sector development plans, and legal frameworks.
- Roadmaps and plans: Developing long-term national strategies and roadmaps, supported by coordination mechanisms.
- Regulatory Mandates: Exploring the impact of sustainability factors for existing mandates of central banks and financial regulators and adjust where necessary.
- Performance Measurement: Developing a performance framework to assess and guide progress in developing sustainable financial systems.
Impact
This is the area where there is least common current practice, but strong potential.Inquiry Publications
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Indonesia Country Report
Date: 30-Apr-2015Placing Indonesia’s economy onto a green and sustainable development pathway, as envisaged in the National Long Term Development Plan, will require a large mobilization of investment. Estimates of the annual investment needed are in the order of US$300‐530 billion, with a large portion of this investment needed in critical infrastructure, as well as environmentally sensitive
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A Role for Finance Ministries
Date: 20-Oct-2015This paper investigates various roles that finance ministries can assume to promote those policies, regulations and standards which help to create a sustainable financial system. Finance ministries typically interact with the financial sector in many ways, from regulator and supervisory mandate setters to tax authority and sovereign debt issuers. All of these points of leverage
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Sustainable Infrastructure and Finance
Date: 13-Jun-2016Infrastructure is often referred to as the backbone of the global economy and plays a fundamental role in societies by enhancing the quality of life and increasing productivity. In addition to its effects on society and the economy, infrastructure can have significant impacts on the environment, depending on the choice of infrastructure. Approximately 75% of
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Towards a Performance Framework for a Sustainable Financial System
Date: 29-Nov-2016This paper is intended to serve as a window on the Inquiry’s analytical approach, providing a deeper understanding of the unifying criteria for evaluation of multiple market designs for financial systems in a variety of economic, political and social settings. It is also intended to provide a foundation for investors and corporate management and policymakers,
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4th Update Report: The Coming Financial Climate
Date: 07-May-2015This is the 4th Update Report of the UNEP Inquiry, it is focused on the challenge of financing the low-carbon transition. Many approaches and instruments will be needed to deliver the financing needed. Public finance, funded by tax revenues and international transfers, will provide part of the solution. However such finance will be inadequate. Private
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3rd Update Report: Pathways to Scale
Date: 07-Jan-2015This is the 3rd Update Report of the UNEP Inquiry, it is focused on the challenge of financing the low-carbon transition. It explores how innovative ideas and practices can be made more effective, adopted more widely, and taken to scale—and as a result move the trillions that are required. Scaling-up proven but limited innovations, is a common
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Human Rights and Sustainable Finance: Exploring the Relationship
Date: 03-Feb-2016Designing and building a sustainable financial system requires a broad focus on what sustainability requires in all its aspects and how finance can help deliver on that important objective. This task includes not only delivering financing for sustainable environmental outcomes and addressing climate change, but it also includes attention to the needs of a sustainable
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Greening the Financial System: Exploring the Ways Forward
Date: 01-Nov-2017This briefing summarises the discussions held during the “Greening the Financial System: Exploring the Ways Forward” event in Washington, D.C. on 12 October 2017. The goal of this convening, the fourth in the series, was to examine lessons from developing and implementing green finance initiatives over the last few years and to highlight successful examples
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Making the Jump
Date: 29-Feb-2016This paper outlines the dynamics behind the financial regulatory paradigm shift that began in 2008-2009. It seeks to identify parallels with and differences from the slower moving, even more consequential, global climate change crisis, and the fitful, still under way, policy paradigm shift that the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and other stakeholders are trying
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China Report: Monetary Policy and Green Finance
Date: 06-Oct-2015Monetary policy has been largely neglected in the worldwide discussions on green finance. Similarly, most central banks have not even started thinking about their role in helping society reach its environmental objectives and about the potential implications of environmental degradation for their mandates. Bringing light to this blind spot is critical. This report aims to