Fritzi Köhler-Geib: Emission data - a mission for statistics

Speech by Dr Fritzi Köhler-Geib, Member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, at the 2025 conference of the European Statistical Forum, Brussels, 16 January 2025.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
23 January 2025

Check against delivery 

Presentation accompanying the speech

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is both a pleasure and an honour for me to be here. This conference is very timely. On one hand, extreme weather events, such as the wildfires around Los Angeles currently in the news or the floods in Spain, underline the urgency of the topic of the conference. On the other hand, it seems that the relevance attributed to combatting climate change is about to be lessened among relevant international players, with a larger focus potentially being placed on economic competitiveness. I have just returned from a discussion among policymakers and researchers in Washington D.C., where many of the exchanges touched on the economic outlook in a potentially more fragmented world economy. Therefore, anything that can help resolve the potential trade-off between fighting climate change and improving economic competitiveness will be helpful, and official statistics in Europe can play an essential role in that.

I would like to address this topic by discussing three main questions with you in the next few minutes: Why do central banks care about climate change and how do official statistics play into this? What are the challenges and opportunities with regards to official statistics on sustainability going forward? In this opening address I will highlight the issue, and then I will give you our Bundesbank perspective on the third question: How can the challenges be addressed? What do we as statistical agencies and central banks have to do in this area going forward?

Let me start with the first question on central banks and climate change – why do we care about it? The simple answer is, we have to do our job. Our mandate is price stability. Climate change imposes stability risks mainly through two channels: physical risks related to extreme weather events that can destroy assets and infrastructure, and transition risks arising from increased investment needs to decarbonise production processes. Beyond this, there is biodiversity loss. In other words, climate change and nature degradation affect a central bank's core tasks. For banking supervision, financial stability analysis, and monetary policy, we need reliable and timely climate data, financial and non-financial data at both aggregated and micro level.