Vis sammendrag
This thesis is about the notion of climate risk and the relations it establishes between finance, questions of value and climate change. Finance has been denoted a central place in the politics of climate change in recent years, noticeable, for example, in how the UN climate conferences since 2021 have included a designated “Finance Day”. A pivotal moment for this development was the 2015 Paris Agreement, which emphasised the importance of shifting financial flows to enable a green transition. The question then is, how to make finance take climate change into account or, conversely, how to make climate change into something of financial value?
One of the main ways the relationship between finance and climate change has been conceptualised is as risk. In particular, the notion of climate risk is tied to the idea that climate change may devalue financial assets at a large scale, ultimately causing a financial crisis. It has been noted how this idea has been brought forth both to incentivise financial actors to start thinking about climate change as a financial risk and move their funds accordingly and because of the worry that a failure to account for climate change could threaten the stability of the financial system. In recent years, climate risk has been established in larger reporting frameworks, but it is not fully understood how finance makes sense of climate risk and what it enables in practice.
Through four papers, this thesis contributes to this understanding and seeks to answer the overriding research question: What is climate risk to finance? I answer this question by investigating how the notion of climate risk is shaped in practice through the sites, tools and
valuations of finance.
The sites I investigate are the main organisation for the Norwegian financial sector, central bank communities, the political apparatus, the climate conference in Glasgow and the market. I thus investigate climate risk in sites that can be said to be part of “the financial world”, in sites of politics and in the relations that are established between them. More specifically, I analyse these sites mainly through documents that are produced in these sites, or in relation to them, and where climate risk is made active. To shed light on how climate risk is both something that is part of larger sociotechnical networks and something that must be made sense of in the different practices, I approach climate risk through actor-network theory and the related pragmatist traditions valuation studies and cultural economy. I also make use of a practice-oriented approach to documents, which underlines how the ocuments are both discursive and material artefacts that enable climate risk to act in different ways.
The first paper analyses a roadmap for the Norwegian financial sector and how it took part in moving the notion of climate risk, as formulated by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), into the state apparatus. More specifically, the paper shows how this movement resulted in the appointment of a new task for the Financial Supervisory Authority to oversee climate risk, in effect making the financial risks of climate policy a concern for government.
In the second paper, I investigate a document published by the Bank for International Settlements and Banque de France, which discusses how central banks should understand and work on the financial risks of climate change. As I show, climate risk is framed as uncertaintyas opposed to some measurable risk, leading to a critique of economic knowledge. The conclusion becomes that central banks should handle climate change neither through risk modelling nor explicit political measures. Instead, it is proposed to connect the concern for the stability of the financial system and the stability of the Earth’s climate so that they are governed together.
The third paper investigates a book written by Mark Carney, who has become an important figure in the intermingling of financial and climate concerns. I analyse the value theory put forth in the book, which frames finance as a value-creating and not value-extracting activity that can enable a green transition. An important element of this value theory is climate risk. I read the book in relation to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which was set up by Carney during the 2021 climate conference in Glasgow and which comprised some of the world’s largest banks, insurers, asset managers and pension funds. At the time of writing, this alliance has been more or less dismantled, and I argue that the reasons for this canbe seen in the “value economy” put forth in the book, which obfuscates the need for political
frames that guide financial action.
The fourth paper analyses climate risk in investment practice and shows how climate risk is framed as the financial risks of future climate policy and a tool that works to align financial risk with climate policy goals. I compare the economization of climate change conducted by climate risk to the approach afforded by carbon markets. In making this comparison, I point to how climate risk and carbon markets operate with different framings of the climate problem they provide solutions to. I argue that while carbon markets approach climate change as a “pollution issue”, climate risk frames it as a “transition issue”, moving it into the future. Concretely, I show how this framing leads to an allocation of capital exclusively to high-emissions companies so that risk management can be used to decarbonise these companies. As I note, it is precisely the assumption that climate policy will become stricter in the future which leads to this action.
By taking climate risk as the empirical object of the thesis, the different papers show how climate risk becomes both a technology, a tool of valuation and an idea that must be made sense of in the different practices. A main argument I make in the thesis is that climate risk should not be understood as something ready-made, either as an idea or after it has been defined in regulatory frameworks. As I show, when brought into specific contexts, the framing of climate risk is intricately tied in with questions of which forms of knowledge, tools and political orderings are required for its management. The more specific argument I make across the four papers is that climate risk ties the concerns of finance and the concerns of climate change more closely together. I show how these connections are made normatively by tying climate change mitigation to the need for a stable financial system, and how they are established concretely in the political apparatus by making the financial risks of climate policy into a concern for government. Conversely, climate risk sets up financial valuation as a tool that is to enable and guide political action; by pricing future climate policy, climate risk is thought to internalise and enable policy objectives. As I point to, however, political frames are the precondition for climate risk to have financial consequences and thus turn climate change into climate risk
