2020 FIR Summary

Over the past twenty-one years, the Financial Innovations Roundtable (FIR), located at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, has worked to address problems related to access to capital for low- and moderate-income consumers and communities. Since 2014, the event has been co-hosted by the Federal Reserve Board. The FIR works with a range of financial institutions, government agencies, foundations, and trade associations to access their expertise for problem-solving discussions.

The 2020 FIR focused on the expanding field of climate finance and was co-hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and The Climate Safe Lending Network. The event was originally slated to be in-person in San Francisco in May 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic and shifted to an online event hosted November 16‒17, 2020. A significant amount has happened in 2020 on climate finance, racial justice, the economy, and COVID-19. The shocks and stresses of climate change are creating risks in low- and moderate-income communities as well as in the financial sector broadly. The 2020 FIR offered an opportunity to discuss the challenges and opportunities banks and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) face as they address these risks and how these institutions can help increase individual, institutional, and community-wide resilience. The program explored new and modified products that address climate risk in communities and how those products can be scaled. Conversations focused around:

The progress that has been made in the climate finance field and the challenges that lie ahead for financial institutions’ climate impact and climate-related risk.

• Promising opportunities to decarbonize investments and finance low-carbon technology and infrastructure.
• How lenders, insurers, housing organizations, and the public sector can work together to reduce housing instability due to climate-related factors and increase the climate-resilience of homes and neighborhoods.
• Solutions to help communities address a wide range of related issues, including home weatherization and disaster preparation, home insurance loss, and climate gentrification and displacement.
• Discussing lessons learned from other sectors such as renewable energy in order to design both people-based and place-based finance solutions that promote racial and economic inclusion.
• The need for all financial institutions to acknowledge that climate risks and racial inequity are systemic risks affecting their bottom line.
• The role that bank regulators can play in promoting collaboration across the financial sector and in leading by example with regard to climate finance.
• Mapping out concrete action-item initiatives including policy and industry pathways to climate safe lending as well as building a financing platform to provide clean energy to low-income communities.
• More broadly, in order to systemically address climate risks, we will need to work together as a range of stakeholders across sectors and collaborate on shared goals and projects.