The government of Spain, the European Commission and the European Investment Bank, the EU bank, organised today a high-level event to discuss sustainable finance at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid.
EIB President Werner Hoyer joined Michael Bloomberg, Founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, Chairman of the TCFD -Taskforce for Climate Related Financial Disclosures, Nadia Calviño, Spain’s Minister of Economy and Business, and Valdis Dombrovskis, European Commission Vice-President, to present Europe’s increased ambition on climate action and its leadership role in sustainable finance where it hopes to inspire others to follow suit.
The EIB has been a pioneer in sustainable finance, for example by issuing the first Green bond in 2007, and will continue to play a key role as the EU’s Climate Bank in connecting the financial system to sustainability in order to make a successful transformation to a greener, more sustainable planet.
Welcome statement at the event from Valdis Dombrovskis, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, Werner Hoyer, President of the European Investment Bank, Nadia Calviño, Minister of Economy and Business of the Government of Spain:
“Four years ago, at COP21 in Paris, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reached an historic agreement to fight against climate change. However, recent scientific findings show that current greenhouse gas concentrations threaten our planet with global temperatures set to rise by 3-5° Celsius by 2100. This is why we need to intensify and increase the ambition of our action to limit the increase of global warming to ‘well’ below 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
To achieve this will require enormous investments to flow into sustainable infrastructure over the next decades. Since public funding will not be sufficient, private investors will have to play a key role – as will financial markets themselves. Their global nature gives them great potential to link local financing needs to global sources of funding.
We should therefore coordinate and link our work together, strengthening international cooperation to scale up sustainable finance globally and promote the integration of markets for green financial products. This is the objective and thinking behind the International Platform on Sustainable Finance launched in October.
Today’s event takes place in the margins of the COP25. What better occasion to discuss with our distinguished speakers how to unlock the great and untapped potential of financial markets?”
