Scaling up green finance to achieve the climate and energy targets:

Under which conditions complementarities among fiscal and monetary policies, financial regulations and instruments, could help to achieve the climate targets while minimizing trade offs on financial instability and inequality?

GreenFin is funded within the Klimafonds+ 11th Call

Aligning investment, consumption and policy decisions to the climate targets is crucial to decarbonize the economy and promote a sustainable and climate-resilient society.

However, so far, policy and investment decisions have been yo-yoing. Challenges to implement stable and coherent polices include the lack of proper understanding of risks, costs and benefits associated to different policy and investment decisions along transition pathways.

On the other hand, the deeply interconnected and financialized nature of the economic system also contributes to amplifying such risks. Thus, addressing such challenges requires to depart from sector-based knowledge and embrace complexity.

GreenFin addresses 3 low-carbon transition challenges:

1.

What role investors’ “climate sentiments” and financial instruments play in fostering or hindering climate policies’ implementation?

2.

How could we exploit the complementarity of fiscal and monetary policies and financial regulations to scale up low-carbon investments while minimizing trade-offs for economic competitiveness, financial stability and inequality?

3.

Under which conditions could greening Austrian development finance contribute to sustainable growth in the beneficiary countries thus minimizing risk of losses for Austrian investors?

GreenFin concept

Project Team

GreenFin’s team combines complementary competences in energy and climate economics, green innovation, socio-ecological modelling, financial risk modelling, green finance, development finance, thus ensuring a comprehensive inter-disciplinary analysis.

Irene Monasterolo, Assistant Professor of Climate Economics and Finance - Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU)

Asjad Naqvi, Research Scholar, Advanced Systems Analysis, IIASA

Daniela Kletzan-Slamanig, Senior Economist, WIFO

Luca De Angelis, Assistant Professor of Econometrics, Department of Economics, UNIBO

Nepomuk Dunz, Research Assistant and PhD Candidate, IIASA

Michael Miess, Research Associate, WU Wien - Institute for Ecological Economics, Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), and IIASA

Andrea Mazzocchetti, Post doctoral researcher, Vienna university of Economics and Business

The project consortium consists of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) as lead, the International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA) and the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) as Austrian partners, and the University of Bologna (UNIBO) as international research excellence partner

News & Activities

We like to keep you informed and updated with all GreenFin's project activity, news and events. Learn on providing relevant insights on how to turn potential risks related to the green finance transition into opportunities for Austria to pursue a smooth low-carbon
transition in the economy and finance, in accordance to the recommendations of the EU Sustainable Finance
Action Plan (SFAP)

UNFCCC COP25 conference

Assessing climate transition risk and scaling up climate investments - Conference , with Univ. of Zurich, ClimateWorks and the EC JRC

EIOPA workshop on assessing climate change-related risks in the insurance sector

GreenFin Project's representative explaining why measuring the carbon footprint of a portfolio and understanding the risks in typical transition scenarios is crucial

GreenFin on the CREDIT Conference 2020

CREDIT Conference 2020 “Environmental, Social and Governance Risks”, 24-25 September 2020, Venice (IT)

The 32nd Annual EAEPE Conference 2020

European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) annual conference, 2-4 September 2020, Bilbao (SP) - The Evolution of Capitalist Structures: Uncertainty, Inequality, and Climate Crisis

GreenFin on the Sustainable Finance conference 2020

Prof. Monasterolo will present the results, which show that the type of green policy financing affects the timing and magnitude of the transition yet with potential unintended effects. In contrast, policy complementarities could help to tame potential trade-offs on macroeconomic performance, financial stability, and inequality.

Assessing climate risks in investors’ portfolios: a journey through climate stress-testing

The original article is published on the PRI (Principles for Responsible Investment) website, by Irene Monasterolo, Assistant Professor of Climate Economics and Finance, Vienna University of Economics and Business. Climate change represents a new source of risk for finance, thus challenging traditional stress-testing approaches. We present a consolidated climate stress-test methodology, which introduces climate uncertainty and complexity…

How to finance virus response in a sustainable way? Scale-up synergies with the Green Deal

The Article is originally posted on the EuroActive website. EU member states should not have to choose between financing the COVID-19 response, undertaking crucial long-term investments to tackle the climate crisis, and debt sustainability, write Irene Monasterolo and Ulrich Volz. Irene Monasterolo is an Assistant Professor of Climate Economics and Finance at the Institute for…

EU virus response to shape climate action

by Irene Monasterolo and Ulrich Volz, originally published on OMFIF Towards shared management of future crises The European Union’s response to the pandemic will have implications for how it tackles climate change. The EU must respond forcefully to stabilise the economy and public health. But it cannot afford to deal with Covid-19 while ignoring the climate…