Opening Remarks by OFR Acting Director James Martin at the Cornell-OFR Conference on Global Climate Finance and Risks

Thank you, Dasol.

Good morning. As Dasol mentioned, I’m James Martin, Acting Director of the Office of Financial Research.

Thank you for joining today’s joint Cornell-OFR Conference on Global Climate Finance and Risks.

I am grateful for the strong, ongoing partnership the Office of Financial Research shares with Cornell University to advance understanding and solutions in global climate finance and risks.

A significant amount of work went into planning this event, and I thank all of the individuals from the Office of Financial Research, the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability for all of their efforts in seeing it to reality.

I especially thank our three conference chairs—Dean Andrew Karolyi and Dr. Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis, from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business; and Dr. Dasol Kim, from the Office of Financial Research for leading and organizing this conference.

Finally, I thank each of our conference speakers, moderators, and panelists—experts from across academia, the public sector, and the financial sector—whom we can all look forward to hearing and learning from today, as they provide insights into policies and strategies that may help mitigate the global impact of climate-related financial risks.

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As you all know, climate-related financial risk is still a relatively new area of financial stability focus. In 2021, an executive order called for, among other things, “facilitating the sharing of climate-related financial risk data and information among FSOC member agencies and other executive departments and agencies as appropriate.”

Following that, in recent years, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) has turned its attention to this issue and the OFR answered the call.

In 2022, the Office of Financial Research piloted the Climate Data and Analytics Hub to allow participants to integrate data from across the federal government, including wildfire, crop condition, precipitation, and other climate-related data with their public supervisory data for a more precise view of the relationship between climate change and financial stability risk.

The Hub was also equipped with statistical and visualization applications that allowed deeper insight into climate-related financial risks and vulnerabilities.

As an outgrowth of the success of the Hub pilot, the Office of Financial Research launched the Joint Analysis Data Environment —JADE for short— in July 2023. JADE enables collaborative, interdisciplinary research on financial stability by providing FSOC member agencies with access to analysis-ready data, analytical software, and high-performance computing in a secure, cloud-based environment.

While JADE was designed to support research on a variety of financial stability topics, the Council identified climate-related financial risk as the first use case for JADE.

During Fiscal Year 2023-2024, the Office of Financial Research also issued several publications on climate-related financial risk areas, to include:

Bank Competition and Strategic Adaptation to Climate Change
The Uneven Distribution of Climate Risks and Discounts,
The Role of Home Equity in Flood Insurance Demand, and
The impact of climate disasters on the property insurance market.

The Office of Financial Research will continue to offer thought leadership in areas related to climate-related financial risk and shed more light on this important topic.

I am encouraged that through conferences such as this one, we are able to collaborate and share knowledge, which will result in greater understanding of how best to promote financial stability in light of global climate risks.

I now turn it over to you and wish everyone a productive conference.