Carney Tapped as UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance

Bank of England Governor and expat Canadian Mark Carney will become the United Nations special envoy on climate action and climate finance when he leaves his current post next year, UN Secretary General António Guterres announced in Madrid yesterday.

During a news conference just ahead of the opening of this year’s UN climate conference, COP 25, Guterres described Carney as “a remarkable pioneer in pushing the financial sector to work on climate.”

“Carney, who is due to step down as head of the Bank of England in January, has urged the financial sector to transform its management of climate risk, and led various international initiatives to improve supervision and disclosure,” The Canadian Press reports, in a dispatch published by the CBC. “He has spoken of ‘stranded assets’—deposits of coal, oil, and gas that might lose their value if the world shifts away from carbon—and decried a lack of transparency about the effect on global warming of trillions of dollars of potential investments.”

“The disclosures of climate risk must become comprehensive, climate risk management must be transformed, and investing for a net-zero world must go mainstream,” Carney said in a statement.

The Bank of England said Carney “would seek to make the impact of climate change central to financial reporting, risk management, and the calculation of returns” ahead of next year’s UN climate conference in Glasgow, CP says.