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Political Science > Environmental Policy

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 14 items for :

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Cover Staff Climate Notes
Unlocking Adaptation Finance in Emerging Market and Developing Economies
Deepali Gautam, Ekaterina Gratcheva, Fabio M Natalucci, and Ananthakrishnan Prasad
Mitigation and decarbonization efforts are falling short of the 1.5°C goal, making adaptation critical. Developing economies are affected the most, despite having contributed the least to the problem. Nearly 98 percent of adaptation finance comes from public actors, with highly fragmented flows from the private sector. As financing needs increase, bringing private sector finance becomes critical and requires reframing adaptation investments from being seen not just as a risk exposure but also as an investment opportunity. This requires addressing real and perceived investment barriers, public-private collaboration and risk sharing, as well as financial incentives and innovation to unlock scalable, inclusive solutions. Adaptation is more complex than mitigation, with challenges in defining, evaluating, pricing, and scaling investments. Progress on adaptation requires policy reforms, incentives, and partnerships between governments, businesses, and communities and public-private risk sharing.
Keywords:
climate finance; climate adaptation; climate resilience; climate finance architecture; adaptation finance; emerging markets and developing countries; private finance mobilization; sustainability; IMF Resilience and Sustainability Trust.; IMF staff climate note; IMF resilience; IMF staff climate Note 2024/007; Climate change; Financial sector; Climate policy; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Banking Law and Climate Change: Key Legal Issues
Mario Tamez, Ender Emre, and Alessandro Gullo
This paper explores the intersection of climate change policies with banking supervisory law. Statutory mandates define banking supervisory agencies’ objectives, functions and powers. Policies that aim to address climate change risks appear fully germane to banking supervisors’ main objective of safety and soundness. As such, banking supervisory agencies have a duty to address climate risks in light of their mandate. A mandate that is not anchored on safety and soundness in light of best practice would blur the accountability of banking supervisory agencies and undermine their legitimacy also with respect to climate. While legal changes can help provide greater legal certaintly, particularly given the long-term perspective of climate change, bank supervisory agencies can take action without fundamental reforms of their legal framework. Accordingly, they have set expectations or requirements for banks to incorporate climate into their strategy and business model, risk management, and governance. A combination of legal instruments—based on soft law and hard law—helps to achieve this objective. Notwithstanding implementation challenges, taxonomies and disclosures remain important tools, and banking supervisors should assess their role in the development of such tools in light of their mandate. The key responsibility to address climate risks rests on banks, and corporate governance frameworks could assist.
Keywords:
Climate Change; Banking Law; Legal Framework; climate change risk; banking supervisor; corporate governance framework; supervisory agency; climate consideration; Climate policy; Bank legislation; Corporate governance; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Central Banks and Climate Change: Key Legal Issues
Mario Tamez, Hans Weenink, and Akihiro Yoshinaga
Well-designed legal frameworks and institutional arrangments support the legitimacy of central banks’ autonomous decision-making when grounded on sound legal basis and can prevent over-stepping in the remit of other authorities. This paper explores the key legal intersections of climate change and central banks. Climate change could impact price and finanical stability, which are at the core of a central bank’s mandate. While central banks’ legal frameworks can support climate change efforts they also determine the boundaries of the measures they can adopt. Central banks need to assess their mandate and authority under their current legal frameworks when considering measures to contribute to the global response to climate change, while taking actions to fulfill their legal mandates.
Keywords:
Climate Change; Central Bank; Legal Framework; central bank development programs; autonomous decision-making; IMF working paper No. 24/192; central bank's mandate; core objective; Financial sector stability; Climate policy; Central bank mandate; Central bank legislation; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Policy Options for Climate Mitigation: Emissions Trading Schemes in Asia-Pacific
Margaux MacDonald and Ian W.H. Parry
Large reductions in global emissions are needed for the world to be on track to meet global temperature goals. Asia-Pacific countries have a critical role in emissions reduction given their large and rising share in global emissions. This paper discusses the main opportunities and behavioral responses for reducing emissions, and commonly used mitigation instruments. It then considers key design issues for carbon pricing, with a focus on emissions trading schemes (ETS), describes measures to overcome the obstacles to carbon pricing, and discusses experiences with carbon pricing relevant for Asia-Pacific economies. Lastly, the paper covers complementary policy reforms, including reinforcing mitigation instruments, public investment, fuel tax reform, green industrial policies, and supporting reforms to the energy sector. Carbon pricing, including ETSs can be the centerpiece of climate mitigation strategies for most countries, particularly if ETSs are designed to mimic some of the administrative and economic attractions of carbon taxes and implemented appropriately.
Keywords:
Emissions trading scheme; climate; Asia; mitigation instrument; climate mitigation strategy; mitigation opportunity; Asia-Pacific country; policy reform; transmission company; Carbon tax; Greenhouse gas emissions; Non-wage benefits; Asia and Pacific; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Green Fiscal Rules? Challenges and Policy Alternatives
Francesca Caselli, Andresa Lagerborg, and Paulo A Medas
This paper studies the impact of green fiscal rules – designed to protect climate-related spending –on debt dynamics. Simulations of green rules that exempt green spending from the rule limits for an emergingmarket economy illustrate that they can lead to unsustainable debt dynamics when the net zero emissions goal is pursued mostly using spending-based instruments (e.g., investment and subsidies). Or the rule would need to implicitly assume a large fiscal adjustment in the non-green budget, which would undermine its credibility. It will be needed to build broad public consensus for a more comprehensive fiscal strategy that tackles the difficult policy tradeoffs that will be required and takes into account long-term effects. A more appropriate mix of climate policies, including actively employing carbon pricing, should be pursued within the overall setting of fiscal and debt objectives. Developing ‘green’ medium-term fiscal frameworks would help to integrate climate change considerations into fiscal policy design in a more comprehensive manner.
Keywords:
Fiscal rule; golden rule; medium-term fiscal framework; MTFF; Policy alternative; policy tradeoff; debt objective; PFM practice; green spending; Fiscal rules; Climate policy; Climate change; Natural disasters; Debt sustainability; Global
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
New Zealand: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. Asia and Pacific Dept
This Selected Issues paper investigates why New Zealand’s inflation is higher and further from target than comparator economies considering two main hypotheses: (1) the persistence of pandemic era shocks, and (2) strong migration inflows fuelling demand. The paper finds that, like in many advanced economies, expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, high global commodity prices, exchange rates, and high maritime transport costs all fed into higher inflation. However, unique for New Zealand, the delayed reopening of the economy likely caused a postponed demand shock relative to similar economies. Results show that the impact of these shocks decay rapidly over time, suggesting positive short-term inflation dynamics. With an eye for what lies ahead, the paper finds that large migration waves are associated with short-run increases in inflation, but that these effects are relatively modest and no longer significant after four years. Instead, the long-run dynamics show evidence that migration can lead to significant long-term gains to productivity, output, and capital growth. Countries with tight labor markets exhibit similar patterns to those without, except the inflationary effects of migration dissipate faster.
Keywords:
supply and demand demand shock; PPI inflation; net migration trend; climate goal; impulse response; Migration; Inflation; Greenhouse gas emissions; Climate policy; Labor markets; Global
Cover Departmental Papers
Unlocking Climate Finance in Asia-Pacific: Transitioning to a Sustainable Future
Cheng Hoon Lim, Ritu Basu, Yan Carriere-Swallow, Kenichiro Kashiwase, Mahmut Kutlukaya, Mike Li, Ehraz Refayet, Dulani Seneviratne, Mouhamadou Sy, and Ruihua Yang
The transition to a sustainable future in the Asia-Pacific region has global economic significance. Despite driving global growth in recent years, the region's heavy coal reliance led to significant greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting climate mitigation and adaptation needs in emerging and developing Asia requires investment of at least $1.1 trillion annually. Actual investment falls short by about $800 billion. Asia-Pacific’s environmental performance has also hampered its ability to tap into private flows from the fast-growing ESG asset class, keeping the cost of issuing sustainable debt instruments relatively high compared to other regions. This paper provides an overview of the climate finance ecosystem in countries in the Asia-Pacific region and presents strategies to mobilize climate finance for the region’s transition to a sustainable future. The paper identifies challenges, including gaps in the climate information architecture, policy conflicts, global complexities, and emphasizes the need for coordinated action involving governments, central banks, financial supervisors, the IMF, and other multilateral institutions. In particular, • Governments need to establish a well-defined climate strategy with strong institutional oversight and coordination to strengthen the framework on data, taxonomies, and disclosures. Fossil fuel subsidies should be phased out and carbon pricing schemes expanded to create fiscal space for sustainable investments. Strengthening macroeconomic management is essential to attract private capital. • Financial supervisors and central banks should coordinate across jurisdictions to promote global, interoperable disclosure standards, enhance climate risk analysis and reporting, and incorporate climate-related financial risks into prudential frameworks. Developing climate labels for sustainable investment funds and shifting the focus of ESG scores to better capture sustainability and climate impact would foster trust in the evaluations. The IMF can drive climate action by integrating discussions in surveillance activities and strengthening data and statistics—including through capacity building and peer learning—to develop common standards around climate risk measurement and analysis. The Resilience and Sustainability Trust could contribute to reducing financing gaps through its catalytic and reform supporting functions, while multilateral development banks could scale up grant financing and concessional lending, and where appropriate adopt risk-mitigating mechanisms to expand lending capacity. Cooperation among multilateral institutions is essential to align efforts and resources to achieve a balanced allocation between mitigation and adaptation lending.
Keywords:
Climate finance; green bonds; data; information architecture; policy; IMF Climate; IMF Library; unlocking climate finance; Climate datum; Asia-Pacific country; Climate change; Greenhouse gas emissions; Climate policy; Asia and Pacific; Global; Pacific Islands
Cover IMF Working Papers
Environmental Policies and Innovation in Renewable Energy
Luca Bettarelli, Davide Furceri, Pietro Pizzuto, and Nadia Shakoor
This paper investigates the effect of Climate Change Policies (CCPs) on green innovation, for a sample of 40 advanced and emerging market economies and 5 economic sectors, during the period 2000-2021. Our results suggest that CCPs increase green patents, with the effect increasing gradually over time. The effect is larger for non-market-based policies—such as R&D subsidies—and technology-support instruments, in countries with greater competitiveness and during periods of stronger economic activity—that is, higher GDP growth, lower uncertainty and financial stress. The results based on a difference-in-differences approach suggest that the positive effect of stricter CCPs on green innovation is stronger in sectors with limited financial constraints.
Keywords:
green patents; climate change policy; diff-in-diff approach; innovation; effect of Climate Change Policies; CCPS increase; innovation in renewable energy; technology-support instrument; technology-support policy; Environmental policy; Renewable energy; Climate policy; Competition; Climate change; Global
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
New Zealand: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. Asia and Pacific Dept
This Selected Issues paper on New Zealand discusses addressing climate change. projections suggest the gap between New Zealand’s emissions targets and the projected path have narrowed significantly though more needs to be done if the Nationally Determined Contribution for 2030 is to be met. Three critical policy initiatives were introduced in 2022: the first Emissions Reduction Plan and associated emissions budgets were adopted; the National Adaptation Plan was published; and the government proposed its framework for pricing agriculture emissions, which account for around 62 percent of net emissions and are the missing piece in the emissions pricing framework. However, policies intended to address the cost-of-living crisis such as cuts to fuel taxes and duties could have an adverse impact on the feasibility of New Zealand’s emissions targets if prolonged. The heightened policy uncertainty was reflected in carbon prices: after peaking in November 2022, the price in the secondary market declined sharply and the June 2023 average price was around 40 percent below the peak level. The March 2023 Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) auction failed to clear, resulting in no new units being released. This is a cause for concern: If falling prices are not arrested, the envisaged emissions reductions may be out of reach. Further, as proceeds from the ETS auctions are intended to be used to support climate investments, shortfalls could put these at risk.
Keywords:
wage Phillips Curve; wage growth; wage inflation; wage pressure; min. wage; inflation expectation; Wages; Minimum wages; Climate change; Greenhouse gas emissions; Climate finance; Australia and New Zealand; Global