The FSAP started in an important macro-financial phase right after the second Covid wave and a third lockdown. The balance sheet resilience of major institutional sectors was at the center of policy considerations. Against this backdrop, the FSAP analyzed the pandemic’s potential “scarring” of banks, insurers, corporates, and households balance sheets, focusing on the interplay of macro-financial/structural conditions and financial vulnerabilities.

This paper explains specifics of stress testing at the IMF. After a brief section on the evolution of stress tests at the IMF, the paper presents the key steps of an IMF staff stress test. They are followed by a discussion on how IMF staff uses stress tests results for policy advice. The paper concludes by identifying remaining challenges to make stress tests more useful for the monitoring of financial stability and an overview of IMF staff work program in that direction. Stress tests help assess the resilience of financial systems in IMF member countries and underpin policy advice to preserve or restore financial stability. This assessment and advice are mainly provided through the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP). IMF staff also provide technical assistance in stress testing to many its member countries. An IMF macroprudential stress test is a methodology to assess financial vulnerabilities that can trigger systemic risk and the need of systemwide mitigating measures. The definition of systemic risk as used by the IMF is relevant to understanding the role of its stress tests as tools for financial surveillance and the IMF’s current work program. IMF stress tests primarily apply to depository intermediaries, and, systemically important banks.

Kazakhstan is vulnerable to transition risk due to the importance of its energy- and emissions-intensive sectors. Domestic and global climate policies would negatively affect Kazakhstan’s economy, its firms, industries, and banks, with heterogenous impacts across industries and banks. Using both micro and macro modeling approaches, the climate risk analysis suggests Kazakhstani banks are exposed to significant transition risk from domestic and, more importantly, global climate policies. The risk is especially higher for carbon intensive sectors, such as fossil fuel extraction, refining, and electricity generation. Banks with large exposure to emissions-intensive sectors experience up to 30 percent additional losses under a disorderly 1.5°C scenario over a 5-to-7-year horizon, compared to the baseline. Banks with a small share of portfolio with emissions-intensives sectors may still experience losses, as climate change mitigation actions affect the economy at large and the financial health of individual consumers, businesses, and industries.

The transition to a sustainable future in the Asia-Pacific region has global economic significance. Despite driving global growth in recent years, the region's heavy coal reliance led to significant greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting climate mitigation and adaptation needs in emerging and developing Asia requires investment of at least $1.1 trillion annually. Actual investment falls short by about $800 billion. Asia-Pacific’s environmental performance has also hampered its ability to tap into private flows from the fast-growing ESG asset class, keeping the cost of issuing sustainable debt instruments relatively high compared to other regions. This paper provides an overview of the climate finance ecosystem in countries in the Asia-Pacific region and presents strategies to mobilize climate finance for the region’s transition to a sustainable future. The paper identifies challenges, including gaps in the climate information architecture, policy conflicts, global complexities, and emphasizes the need for coordinated action involving governments, central banks, financial supervisors, the IMF, and other multilateral institutions. In particular, • Governments need to establish a well-defined climate strategy with strong institutional oversight and coordination to strengthen the framework on data, taxonomies, and disclosures. Fossil fuel subsidies should be phased out and carbon pricing schemes expanded to create fiscal space for sustainable investments. Strengthening macroeconomic management is essential to attract private capital. • Financial supervisors and central banks should coordinate across jurisdictions to promote global, interoperable disclosure standards, enhance climate risk analysis and reporting, and incorporate climate-related financial risks into prudential frameworks. Developing climate labels for sustainable investment funds and shifting the focus of ESG scores to better capture sustainability and climate impact would foster trust in the evaluations. The IMF can drive climate action by integrating discussions in surveillance activities and strengthening data and statistics—including through capacity building and peer learning—to develop common standards around climate risk measurement and analysis. The Resilience and Sustainability Trust could contribute to reducing financing gaps through its catalytic and reform supporting functions, while multilateral development banks could scale up grant financing and concessional lending, and where appropriate adopt risk-mitigating mechanisms to expand lending capacity. Cooperation among multilateral institutions is essential to align efforts and resources to achieve a balanced allocation between mitigation and adaptation lending.

The financial sectors of the Middle East and Central Asia (ME&CA) countries should play an important role in supporting climate-related policies for the region. The sectors are vulnerable to downside risks from climate-related shocks and at the same time offer the potential to help fill the financing gap for needed adaptation and mitigation strategies. Successful approaches to climate change in the region therefore need to coherently integrate financial sector strategies within the overall policy framework to meet this important challenge. To this end, policymakers must ensure that financial sectors are prepared for a green future. This means enhancing the resilience of banks to physical and transition risks from climate change and boosting the capacity of insurance sectors to speed recovery from climate-related disasters and help offset economic costs. Moreover, policies are needed to foster an enabling environment for private green finance, attract investment from other official entities, such as sovereign wealth funds (SWF), and facilitate support from international financial institutions and multilateral development banks. In the near term, policy efforts should center around better understanding and measuring climate-related risks. This includes prioritizing the implementation of methodologies for quantifying and reporting such risks, promoting their transparent disclosure by financial institutions, and strengthening frameworks for their forecasting and analyzing. Over the medium term, governments can play an important role in supporting green finance through incentives and market mechanisms, phasing-out energy subsidies, and introducing new tools and markets (such as carbon pricing frameworks), which can stimulate demand for investment in green technologies. The paper offers a unique regional perspective on climate risks in ME&CA's financial sectors and outlines the road ahead in transitioning to a green future. It is the first to evaluate the impact of climate change on banking institutions in the region and assess the capacity of insurance in mitigating climate-related damages and losses. It contributes to the existing literature by synthesizing the size and nature of regional financing needs for adaptation and mitigation and discussing both opportunities and challenges for the development of green finance. The paper's policy recommendations provide guidance to policymakers on how to develop regulatory responses to enhance financial sustainability amid climate change risks.

The FSAP took place against the background of a fast-evolving financial sector in Ireland and heightened uncertainty in the global economy. The Irish financial landscape has undergone significant changes since the global financial crisis with increasing divergence between an innovative and fast-growing international finance sector and the retail banking sector that has been consolidating and faces post-GFC operating restrictions and increasing competition from non-bank players. In the meantime, both the global pandemic and Brexit have left uneven marks across the economy, while there are risks from the unwinding of public support that has softened COVID-19 shock’s impact on the economy. Going forward, various ongoing and emerging risks, such as persistent inflationary pressures, fueled by supply bottlenecks, and the war in Ukraine, may impede recovery, and magnify vulnerabilities to downside shocks.

Climate change presents risks and opportunities for the real economies and financial sectors of the IMF’s global membership. Understanding the risks is key to prepare for a successful transition to a lower carbon global economy. This will unlock the many opportunities for technological progress and structural transformation along the path that financial sectors around the world will need to adapt to and support. This note lays out the IMF staff’s emerging approach to assessing the impact of climate change on banking sector stability risks conducted in the context of the IMF’s Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP). The note starts with a primer on climate change risk, both transition and physical, explaining some of the technical terms and concepts used in this work. It explains the approach to standard risk analysis in FSAPs, and how this would be modified in broad terms to incorporate climate risk. The note then discusses different approaches to the analysis of physical versus transition risk, their implications for the macro-economy and across sectors in the real economy and different geographies, and how all these effects map into the banking sector. The note illustrates concepts with examples of applications from recent FSAPs and takes note of the many challenges confronting this work, including data gaps and uncertainty regarding climate projections and long simulation horizons in conducting the climate risk analysis. As such the note is focused on methods that IMF staff are deploying to raise awareness of the risks, and adaptation needs, including need for banks to develop tools to manage climate risks and for financial sector supervisory authorities to adequately supervise this risk.

The recent global financial crisis has forced a re-examination of risk transmission in the financial sector and how it affects financial stability. Current macroprudential policy and surveillance (MPS) efforts are aimed establishing a regulatory framework that helps mitigate the risk from systemic linkages with a view towards enhancing the resilience of the financial sector. This paper presents a forward-looking framework ("Systemic CCA") to measure systemic solvency risk based on market-implied expected losses of financial institutions with practical applications for the financial sector risk management and the system-wide capital assessment in top-down stress testing. The suggested approach uses advanced contingent claims analysis (CCA) to generate aggregate estimates of the joint default risk of multiple institutions as a conditional tail expectation using multivariate extreme value theory (EVT). In addition, the framework also helps quantify the individual contributions to systemic risk and contingent liabilities of the financial sector during times of stress.

This publication serves as a roadmap for exploring and managing climate risk in the U.S. financial system. It is the first major climate publication by a U.S. financial regulator. The central message is that U.S. financial regulators must recognize that climate change poses serious emerging risks to the U.S. financial system, and they should move urgently and decisively to measure, understand, and address these risks. Achieving this goal calls for strengthening regulators’ capabilities, expertise, and data and tools to better monitor, analyze, and quantify climate risks. It calls for working closely with the private sector to ensure that financial institutions and market participants do the same. And it calls for policy and regulatory choices that are flexible, open-ended, and adaptable to new information about climate change and its risks, based on close and iterative dialogue with the private sector. At the same time, the financial community should not simply be reactive—it should provide solutions. Regulators should recognize that the financial system can itself be a catalyst for investments that accelerate economic resilience and the transition to a net-zero emissions economy. Financial innovations, in the form of new financial products, services, and technologies, can help the U.S. economy better manage climate risk and help channel more capital into technologies essential for the transition. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5247742

This report provides an assessment of how governments can generate inclusive economic growth in the short term, while making progress towards climate goals to secure sustainable long-term growth. It describes the development pathways required to meet the Paris Agreement objectives.