Climate change unfolds over hundreds of years because carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases sink out of the atmosphere very slowly. Investment to control climate change will bring its benefits over an equally long period, and borrowing to finance this investment will have to have a comparable term. Few national governments could borrow for such a long term. The report A World Climate Bank, suggests a new international financial institution to underwrite this sort of debt. How could this bank operate, how can it be governed, and how could it maintain its solvency, solidity, and credibility over the required long horizon?
Waldemar Ingdahl, Communications Officer at the Global Challenges Foundation, is joined by the two authors of the report:
John Broome is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is also a visiting Professor at Stanford University and an adjunct Professor at the Australian National University.
Duncan Foley is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Comments are provided by Augusto Lopez-Claros, Executive Director and Chair of the Global Governance Forum. He is an international economist with over 30 years of experience in international organizations, including most recently at the World Bank.