Climate Policy Initiative

The Advisory Finance Group (AFG) is a project to provide technical support to a group of central banks, finance ministers, and development finance institutions to integrate climate concerns into fiscal and monetary policy. AFG presupposes that most climate risk will eventually be borne by sovereign governments. Traditional climate advocacy has sought to ameliorate this risk through fiscal (carbon pricing, etc.) and regulatory means. The continuing failure of nation states to enact fiscal climate solutions (to say nothing of the gridlock around fiscal solutions to the 2008 financial crisis) has lead the AFG to propose the development of central bank/monetary-driven risk-based approaches. The theory posits that quantifying and assigning risks to public and large private asset classes would be analogous to carbon pricing mechanisms. In addition, policy success might be easier to achieve at the central bank level rather than through legislative bodies. One key element would be the creation of new AI tools to replace the equilibrium-based tools currently in use to quantify and assign risk.