Financial institutions, supervisors, and academia around the world recognize that extreme climate events, as well as a disorderly transition to a low-carbon economy, could have destabilizing effects on the financial system. Climate-related financial risks, stemming from physical and transition risks, pose new challenges to financial authorities and institutions because they are subject to substantial uncertainty, long time horizons and tail-risk. The possible simultaneous occurrence of climate-risks across multiple jurisdictions and sectors also has implications for financial soundness.

To better understand how these climate-related physical and transition risks affect financial soundness, the BIS Innovation Hub Singapore Centre is hosting a roundtable at the Singapore FinTech Festival. The roundtable brings together central bankers, industry experts, and thought leaders from academia and the private sector to advance the discourse on how to bolster the financial sector’s resilience to environmental risks.

The roundtable discussion is split into two parts. In the first, participants will provide insights on both private and public sector programs/projects and use cases to bolster the resilience of financial institutions to environmental risks. In the second, participants will look ahead and share their views on how we can further develop our efforts to prepare financial institutions for the climate-related challenges to come.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals open up the viability of the Blue Economy to deliver improved environmental impact with new financial and business models. Technology, data and the capital markets sit at the heart of making this happen, and the movement on entrepreneurs is under way. This session will forecast the opportunity to participate and the value at stake.

While the globalisation of supply chains offers myriad opportunities for MSMEs to scale and access new markets, the call for them to disclose, verify and track their sustainability performances may prove to be a hindrance in accessing the growing pools of green supply chains, business and financing opportunities.

Project Savannah was developed to help these MSMEs overcome the challenges they face in measuring and reporting their environmental, social and governance (ESG) performances. It seeks to do so through capacity building, simplified reporting and more accessible data.

In this session, participants will exchange views on how to strengthen resourcing and incentivisation for MSMEs to undertake such reporting, and how governments, international organisations and private sector players can coordinate support. Additionally, they will discuss how Project Savannah can be scaled more rapidly and efficiently, and to which priority markets, in order for its benefits to be promulgated to areas of greatest need.

This roundtable seeks to establish the foundations for a Project Savannah implementation playbook that outlines deployment strategies, best practices, and actionable steps for current and future participants.

Project Greenprint was conceived by MAS as a public-private initiative to co-develop digital utilities that power the sustainability data needs of countries, financial institutions and the real economy. Over the past two years, collaborators undertook multiple experiments to validate a range of core concepts and use cases. 
 
These learnings are powering the project’s next phase – the launch of an open and integrated Greenprint digital platform, that supports universal reporting needs and facilitates consent-based access to data, to power net zero initiatives and support the innovation of further solutions. These capabilities will drive national-level reporting in Singapore and other like-minded countries.
 
Hear from key collaborators as they opine on the potential opportunities and new horizons Greenprint will unlock.