Our Founder, Ben McQuhae, was invited to take part in the panel discussion “Achieving COP26 Finance Ambitions, a view from Asia-Pacific” and share thoughts and expectations with other Asia-Pacific leaders working to transition to a sustainable financial system. This was part of a series of panel discussions hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNDP Financial Centres for Sustainability (FC4S) in the event “Unpacking COP26 Finance Day – Global Reactions” on 4 November 2021.
In brief summary, our contribution to the discussion:
1. COP26 Finance Day announcements: We are all looking for positives from COP26 and hope world leaders and their negotiating teams will exceed expectations. The anticipated (but nevertheless deflating) delay in funding for the climate finance fund is a reminder that words can be just that. We can pool our collective convening power to help ensure that promises are kept.
2. Skills and innovation: There are many building blocks that must be in place before we can claim to have an effective sustainable financial system. Talent, innovation and fintech are critical. Without the necessary skills and financial infrastructure we simply won’t have the tools to facilitate the mobilisation of capital in support of climate action even if the capital and policy commitments are there. We are likely already experiencing bottlenecks. Building the necessary capacity will take time and in the meantime we all have to try to be discerning, and for that we are going to need our anti-greenwashing antennae out.
3. Carbon market: Hong Kong is a city in China, which has the world’s greatest decarbonisation challenge. We will all need to consider offsetting as part of our decarbonisation strategies. We all want a carbon price to effectively price climate risk into the cost of capital. Hong Kong is a financial centre economy with world class financial markets infrastructure and one of Hong Kong’s roles should be to provide a robust, international standard-compliant carbon market to support China’s national ETS and the growth of high integrity offsets known as CCER. Without such a carbon market and the all-important quality control, it is hard to imagine how our net zero carbon ambitions can be realised.
