The Green Central Banking Scorecard 2022

Central banks and financial regulators are currently operating in a context of multiple, overlapping crises. Acute physical risks from climate change are materialising globally, with the most severe impacts in the Global South. Droughts, floods, wildfires and heat waves have wrought havoc on human lives and natural ecosystems, thereby severely impacting price stability (Caswell, 2022). The price of the world’s “addiction to fossil fuels” has been further highlighted by soaring energy prices, which are leaving people across the world unable to afford basic essentials (United Nations, 2022). Central banks and financial regulators now stand at crossroads: support socially and environmentally catastrophic economic pathways that will undermine their own price and financial stability mandates, or act decisively to help shift financial flows to a credible pathway to net zero (Network for Greening the Financial System, 2022b).

This Green Central Banking Scorecard 2022, published by Positive Money and 19 NGOs including Reclaim Finance, ranks G20 central banks according to their environmental practices. It reveals that central banks are still struggling to move from words to deeds : while progress has been made in risk management and supervision, all central banks – even the top-ranked Eurosystem ones – are still unwilling to support the ecological transition by mobilising monetary policy.