Gareth Bryant, Sophie Webber
Responding to climate change is commonly understood as a financial challenge: What are the expected costs of the impacts of climate change? How much money is needed to reduce emissions to a safe level and to help people live in a changing climate? Who should pay? While these questions reflect the big issues of climate politics – about historical responsibility, unequal exposure and the terms of possible futures – they do not tell us a lot about the relationships between and contestations over climate change and finance capitalism.
This book develops an expansive definition of climate finance and a critical framework for analysing its political economy. Drawing from a wide-range of case studies, the authors highlight the diversity, scale and contradictions of climate finance entanglements – from funding renewable energy, putting a price on carbon, responsible investing and financialising resilience.
Gareth Bryant is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. His books include Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism (2019).
Sophie Webber is Lecturer in Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.