The One Planet Summit: Financing The Transition To A Sustainable Economy
Blog written by Jessica Fries, Executive Chairman, A4S
Two years to the day after the Paris Climate Accord, world leaders from government and business will be attending the One Planet Summit in Paris on 12th December 2017 to discuss tangible actions to address the threat of climate change, and in particular, the role of finance.
Focusing on the need for collective action, innovation and collaboration, the Summit aims to deliver some real and practical next steps to curb climate change. There are four areas that A4S will be raising at the Summit, which we see as vital to success.
1. Visible finance leadership
The finance community has the power to take ownership and accelerate the speed and scale of action to address the material risks posed by climate change, ensuring that investment is allocated towards financing the transition to a sustainable economy, and that effective measures are taken to adapt to those risks that cannot be avoided.
More and more investors and businesses are taking credible action, embedding their response to climate change into strategy and decision making. To many, however, these actions remain a well kept secret. The leadership being taken needs to be visible, and all actors from across the investment chain can play their part in providing the right signals that will empower others to act.
This is one of the reasons that we worked with members of our CFO Leadership Network and the wider CFO community, the CEOs of our Accounting Bodies Network, and the Chairs of Pension Funds, to sign a Statement of Support signalling their commitment to adoption of the Taskforce on Climate related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations. Climate change poses significant financial risk. CFOs and other members of the finance community must, therefore, play a central role in the response.
2. Cooperation
The One Planet Summit has rightly focused on the power of collective action and the need to "work together for the good of all".
This is consistent with the view expressed at last month's A4S Summit 2017 with consensus from the Chairmen, CEOs and CFOs from pension funds, asset managers and companies present of the need to collaborate across the whole investment chain. This included driving new and potentially difficult conversations in order to facilitate more informed business and investment decision making.
We want to see how different stakeholders from public, private and NGO sectors come together in Paris with a mandate to share knowledge, find common solutions and collaborate.
3. Measuring what matters: implementing the Taskforce on Climate related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) recommendations
Progress is dependent on greater alignment and collaboration between actors at all levels to measure progress and accelerate the transition to a sustainable global economy. Each group is reliant on the information provided by others to take informed decisions. The development of a standardized reporting framework, and use of consistent metrics, is key, as are the steps that regulators and others can take to ensure harmonization and adoption. This convergence and standardization is largely happening in the traditional areas of climate change related reporting, such as GHG emissions. In other newer areas which form part of the TCFD recommendations, such as scenario analysis, collaboration will be vital as organizations start to undertake this analysis in some cases for the first time. Our scenario analysis and TCFD workshops with investors, CFOs and finance teams have highlighted an appetite to work together, something which we will continue to support.
4. Action
Above all we need action. Time is rapidly running out.
