Building a sustainable financial system: the state of practice and future priorities

Artículo de revistaEfforts to align the global financial system with climate security and sustainable development are entering a new phase. Five years ago, only a handful of central banks were addressing the significance of the environmental crisis for the delivery of their mandate. Today, a growing number of central banks, along with supervisors across banking, insurance, pensions and securities, are moving from the recognition of their role in building a sustainable financial system to the implementation of a growing range of measures. This paper charts the rise of central bank and supervisor action on climate change and wider sustainability issues, analyses the key features of the “new normal” and then highlights priority themes for policy and research in the years ahead

Constructing climate risk: how finance governs its relationship with the planet’s climate

This thesis is driven by the question of how finance governs its relationship with the planet’s climate. Structuring this emergent governance experiment is a new type of risk: climate risk. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this thesis problematises climate risk by tracing its construction. Theoretically, the thesis advances debates around the potentials and limits of ANT in the context of financial governance. It goes beyond ANT by formulating a wider conceptual approach to climate risk. Empirically, this research uncovers the genesis of a governance tool pivotal to the construction of climate risk: the disclosure framework developed by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). The first paper traces the translation of climate risk from a contested claim into a fact leading to the creation of the TCFD. Novel to the literature, it foregrounds the critical role of face-to-face contact and proposes an extension of ANT’s conception of materiality to account for human interaction. The second paper follows the development of the TCFD’s global disclosure framework. Tracing shifting conflict lines, it draws into question conceptions of industry interest representation and argues for the need to take individuals’ personal interests seriously. The third paper focuses on one of the TCFD’s key recommendations: the conduct of climate scenario analysis. Advancing literatures on the modelling and imagination of futures, the paper argues that the process of designing global reference scenarios produced exclusionary imperatives. These imperatives constrain both the imagination of climate and financial catastrophes, and solution pathways. The final paper contextualises the thesis by proposing an integrative research agenda anchored in the Callonian concept of economization and thus calling for a sociology of climate risk. The thesis as a whole provides a forensic interrogation of the socio-technical politics of defining climate risk. Furthermore, it illuminates the limits and potentials of the climate risk frame and thus of finance’s role in the Anthropocene

Participatory action research as a means of achieving ecological wisdom within climate change resiliency planning

The impacts of recent extreme weather events as well as the evidence of our changing climate has sparked a new sense of urgency in resiliency planning in the Northeast U.S. Vulnerability to climate change impacts is not limited to the built environment, but rather extends to the sociotechnical systems that include the perceptions, values, preferences and patterns of behavior of various groups of human stakeholders. To more fully incorporate the human dimension into resiliency planning we must elicit and apply the ecological wisdom (EW) of local residents and stakeholders. The complexity of EW has yet to be fully described; this paper does not develop a new definition, but rather, expands the definition of EW to include local knowledge of urban dwellers that can be tapped to more effectively inform resiliency planning. We present a recent example that demonstrates how participatory action research (PAR) methods can be used to gather EW that would not ordinarily be obtained by more traditional vulnerability assessment methods. Our case study is based upon the Alewife Disaster Preparedness and Community Resiliency Planning Initiative of the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite the limited scope of this PAR project, a surprising number of useful observations and recommendations were obtained, which could serve to enhance the ongoing resiliency planning of the City of Cambridge. Local stakeholders also suggested a number of what W.F. Whyte described as “social inventions” for strengthening the quality of disaster preparedness and community resiliency within the Alewife community. We highlight the need to give more attention to the human dimension of resiliency planning by better understanding how a variety of local stakeholders’ experience climate-related disasters, perceive the effectiveness of alternative disaster preparedness and community resiliency strategies, and determine their willingness to contribute to ongoing resiliency planning taking place within their community

Prognostic value of changes in high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T beyond biological variation in stable outpatients with cardiovascular disease: a validation study

Objective!#!To evaluate the prognostic implications of longitudinal long-term changes beyond the biological variation of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T (hs-cTnT) in outpatients with stable or asymptomatic cardiovascular disease (CV) and to assess possible differences in the prognostic value while using reference change value (RCV) and minimal important differences (MID) as metric for biological variation.!##!Methods!#!Hs-cTnT was measured at index visit and after 12 months in outpatients presenting for routine follow-up. The prognostic relevance of a concentration change of hs-cTnT values exceeding the biological variation defined by RCV and MID of a healthy population within the next 12 months following the stable initial period was determined regarding three endpoints: all-cause mortality (EP1), a composite of all-cause mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction and stroke (EP2), and a composite of all-cause mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke, hospitalization for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) or decompensated heart failure, and planned and unplanned percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI, EP3).!##!Results!#!Change in hs-cTnT values exceeding the biovariability defined by MID but not by RCV discriminated a group with a higher cardiovascular risk profile. Changes within MID were associated with uneventful course (NPV 91.6-99.7%) while changes exceeding MID were associated with a higher occurrence of all endpoints within the next 365 days indicating a 5.5-fold increased risk for EP 1 (p = 0.041) a 2.4-fold increased risk for EP 2 (p = 0.049) and a 1.9-fold increased risk for EP 3 (p < 0.0001).!##!Conclusions!#!In stable outpatients MID calculated from hs-cTnT changes measured 365 ± 120 days apart are helpful to predict an uneventful clinical course.!##!Clinical trials identifier!#!NCT01954303

Soil water storage appears to compensate for climatic aridity at the xeric margin of European tree species distribution

Based on macroecological data, we test the hypothesis whether European tree species of temperate and boreal distribution maintain their water and nutrient supply in the more arid southern margin of their distribution range by shifting to more fertile soils with higher water storage than in their humid core distribution range (cf. soil compensatory effects). To answer this question, we gathered a large dataset with more than 200,000 plots that we related to summer aridity (SA), derived from WorldClim data, as well as soil available water capacity (AWC) and soil nutrient status, derived from the European soil database. The soil compensatory effects on tree species distribution were tested through generalized additive models. The hypothesis of soil compensatory effects on tree species distribution under limiting aridity was supported in terms of statistical significance and plausibility. Compared to a bioclimatic baseline model, inclusion of soil variables systematically improved the models’ goodness of fit. However, the relevance measured as the gain in predictive performance was small, with largest improvements for P. sylvestris, Q. petraea and A. alba. All studied species, except P. sylvestris, preferred high AWC under high SA. For F. sylvatica, P. abies and Q. petraea, the compensatory effect of soil AWC under high SA was even more pronounced on acidic soils. Soil compensatory effects might have decisive implications for tree species redistribution and forest management strategies under anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, soil compensatory effects deserve more intensive investigation, ideally, in studies combining different spatial scales to reduce the uncertainty associated with the precision of soil information