Today @ Mercator Roundtable "Sustainable Finance - Leveraging finance for a sustainable Transformation"

Dr. Wiebke Szymczak is one of three invited panelist at the Mercator Roundtable 2020. She will discuss with Ass.-Prof. Dr. Martin Nerlinger and Franziska Schütze about ways to leverage finance for a sustainable transformation.

In particular, her main thesis is that the term "sustainable finance" covers a number of different concepts that imply very different incentives for the real economy. For example, a company with minimal ESG-related risks can sometimes cause significant negative externalities.
on the one hand. On the other hand, an environmentally and socially sustainable company may be exposed to extreme ESG-related risks in the future.The transformative potential of sustainable finance ultimately depends on the extent to which the financial sector has credible
incentives to reduce negative externalities and promote positive externalities (impact). In this context, it must be taken into account that
government regulation is explicitly anticipated as a transformation risk.