Norges Bank Climate Conference
The conference took place on 21 October at our Oslo office.
Exploring the macroeconomic and financial impacts of climate change
Norges Bank Climate Conference brings together leading experts to explore how climate change and the energy transition affect the macroeconomy and financial markets.
The conference features keynote speeches from President Christine Lagarde (European Central Bank) and former US Vice President Al Gore (Chairman, Generation Investment Management), alongside presentations by distinguished academic speakers such as Bård Harstad (Stanford University), Solomon Hsiang (Stanford University) and Harrison Hong (Columbia University).
Watch the conference
Speakers
Christine Lagarde
Christine Lagarde has been President of the European Central Bank (ECB) and, in this function, also Chair of the European Systemic Risk Board since November 2019.
Between 2011 and 2019 she served as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that she served as French Minister of Economy and Finance from 2007 to 2011, having been Trade Secretary from 2005 to 2007. A lawyer by background, she practised for 20 years with international law firm Baker McKenzie, of which she became Global Chair in 1999. She was the first woman to hold each of these positions.
In 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024 President Lagarde was ranked the second most influential woman in the world by Forbes. She has also been recognised by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was named Officer in the French Order of the Legion of Honor in April 2012 and Commander in the National Order of Merit in May 2021.
Al Gore
Former Vice President Al Gore is the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis, a founding partner and chairman of Generation Investment Management, and a co-founder of Climate TRACE. He is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a member of the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees, and a past member of the board of directors at Apple.
Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years.
He is the author of the #1 New York Times best-sellers An Inconvenient Truth and The Assault on Reason and the NYT best-sellers Earth in the Balance, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, and most recently, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.
He is the subject of the documentary movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won two Oscars in 2006 — and a second documentary in 2017, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” In 2007, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.” Gore is a native Tennessean who currently resides on his farm in Carthage, Tennessee.
Kristin Halvorsen
Kristin Halvorsen is the director of CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo.
Halvorsen has an extensive background in Norwegian politics. Between 2005 and 2013, she was a member of the Stoltenberg II government where she served as the first female Finance Minister from 2005 to 2009 and Minister of Knowledge from 2009 to 2013. Halvorsen was the leader of the Socialist Party from 1997 to 2012 and an elected parliamentary representative from 1989 to 2013.
She has held various positions and was, among other things, chairman of the Biotechnology Council (Bioteknologirådet) (2014 – 2019), was a member of the Mork Committee in 2016, the Expert group for the assessment of climate risk in the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) in 2021 and the Climate Change Committee 2050 in 2022-23.
Halvorsen is currently chairing the government-appointed Nuclear Power Committee. Furthermore, she is Vice Chair of CCICED (China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development), board member of Statkraft, chairman of the Crown Prince Couple's Fund and Deputy Chair of SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute).
Hilde Bjørnland
Hilde C. Bjørnland is Professor of Economics at BI Norwegian Business School, scientific advisor to Norges Bank, and Director of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices (CAMP). She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Oslo, where her thesis was awarded His Majesty The King of Norway’s Gold Medal, and an MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics.
Bjørnland has published extensively in leading academic journals on empirical macroeconomics, energy economics, and monetary and fiscal policy, which are her main areas of research and teaching. Her work has also been widely disseminated in international media. In addition, she has contributed broadly to economic policy, serving on numerous public committees, advisory councils, and boards. She has also served as Provost for Research and Academic Resources at BI.
Emilia Garcia-Appendini
Emilia Garcia-Appendini is an Associate Professor of Banking and Financial Intermediation at the University of St Gallen and an affiliated Senior Research Economist at Norges Bank. Previously, she has been Research Fellow at the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich, and Assistant Professor of Finance in the universities of St Gallen and Bocconi. Her main areas of research are corporate finance, financial intermediation and sustainable finance.
Garcia-Appendini's research has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Finance, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, among others.
Bård Harstad
Bård Harstad is the David S. Lobel Professor in Business and Sustainability and Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a professor of Environmental Social Sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Before joining Stanford, he taught at Harvard, MIT, Northwestern University, Toulouse School of Economics, and University of Oslo. Harstad is the author of "Pledge-and-Review Bargaining: From Kyoto to Paris", and of many other research publications in the very top journals in economics. He has also served as editor for two of the leading journals in the field.
Harrison Hong
Harrison Hong is the John R. Eckel Jr. Professor of Financial Economics at the Columbia University Department of Economics and Executive Director of the Program for Economic Research. Before coming to Columbia in 2016, he was on the economics faculty of Princeton University, most recently as the John Scully ’66 Professor of Economics and Finance. Prior to that, he was an associate professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1997-2001. He received his B.A. in economics and statistics with highest distinction from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1997.
In 2009, Hong was awarded the Fischer Black Prize, given once every two years to the best American finance economist under the age of 40. He received honorary doctorates from Stockholm School of Economics and Aalto University, and is a past Director of the American Finance Association. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an academic advisor at LSV Asset Management. He has contributed to a number of areas in financial economics, including stock market efficiency and behavioral finance. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025 for his recent work on climate finance.
Solomon Hsiang
Solomon Hsiang directs the Global Policy Laboratory at Stanford University, where his team integrates social science, natural science, and data science to better understand how we can effectively manage global resources.
Hsiang is currently a Professor of Global Environmental Policy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, a co-founder and Co-Director of the Climate Impact Lab, co-founder of mosaiks.org, Research Associate at the NBER, and a National Geographic Explorer. Hsiang is also currently co-editing the Handbook of the Economics of Climate Change and co-leads the Aerial History Project.
Previously, Hsiang was faculty at the University of California, Berkeley at the Goldman School of Public Policy (2013-24). Hsiang was also Lead Author of the first Economics chapter in the Fifth National Climate Assessment (2023) and, from 2023-24, Hsiang served as the first Chief Environmental Economist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he oversaw the inaugural year of the United States natural capital accounting program.
Diego Kãnzig
Diego Känzig is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Känzig's research interests are in macroeconomics with a focus on climate change and inequality. He studies how energy use and climate shocks affect growth and fluctuations, and how inequality and household finance shape the macroeconomy and policy. He also serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of the European Economic Association.
Tim Lenton
Professor Tim Lenton is the founding Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science. He has more than 25 years research experience, focused on modelling of the biosphere, climate, biogeochemical cycles, and associated tipping points. Tim is renowned for his work identifying climate tipping points, which informed the setting of the 1.5 C climate target, associated net zero targets, and nationally determined contributions.
Lenton works with policymakers and businesses helping them assess the risks of climate change and nature loss and highlighting the opportunities for ‘positive tipping points’ that can accelerate change towards net zero. In 2023, Professor Lenton led a team of more than 200 people from over 90 organisations in 26 countries to produce an authoritative assessment of the risks and opportunities of both negative and positive tipping points in the Earth system and society. The ‘Global Tipping Points Report’ produced in partnership with Bezos Earth Fund was published at COP28.
Bjørn Samset
Bjørn H. Samset is a climate scientist and science communicator at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research, and a professor of climate physics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He works on global climate evolution and how we can tackle climate change, and specializes in the climate effects of air pollution. He has been a member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and currently co-chairs the international climate modelling project RAMIP.
Samset has also published several popular science books, and is a regular commentator in Norwegian and international media on climate topics and their relation to policy development.
Laura Starks
Laura T. Starks, Ph.D., is the George Kozmetsky Centennial Distinguished University Chair and Professor of Finance at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. Her current research focuses on sustainable finance issues and investor expectations. She is Fellow at the AFA, ECGI, CEPR, FMA, Senior Fellow for ABFER and Research Associate of the NBER. She has been president of the AFA, SFS, WFA and FMA.
Stark has served on mutual funds’ boards of directors, pension fund advisory committees, the Board of Governors of the Investment Company Institute, and advisory committees for the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global. She currently serves on advisory boards or committees for AIF Global, FTSE-Russell, Kroner Center for Financial Research, Investment Company Institute, Netspar, and the PRI (Principles of Responsible Investing), where she is also Chair of the Academic Network Advisory Committee.