"Top central banker defends climate work after US pushback", 21 July 2025

"A senior central banker has defended supervisors’ work on climate change after attacks from the US, and warned officials had previously “completely underestimated” the risks rising temperatures pose to the financial system.

Central bankers are “non-political animals” and “pure technocrats” who simply follow their “job description” when they work on climate change, said Sabine Mauderer, deputy governor of the Bundesbank and head of the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a global policy forum.

“In this regard it is natural that if you see a growing risk, a growing financial risk, that the interest of the central bankers is increasing,” she said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Her comments follow signs of disquiet among global finance officials about working on climate change, following the election of Donald Trump...

The Federal Reserve quit the NGFS in January, claiming the global policy forum’s work had “increasingly broadened in scope” to cover issues outside the US central bank’s “statutory mandate”. US regulators have also called for financial rulemakers on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the standard-setter for global financial regulation, to downgrade a flagship climate project.

[...]

Despite the Fed’s departure from the network, Mauderer insisted it had continued to grow...

Its latest analysis anticipates a 15 per cent hit to global GDP by the middle of the century from climate-related risks even if governments stick to existing emissions reduction policies...."