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The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, along with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, IFEP, CSIL, and Ci3, will co-host a talk for the Columbia community by Christina Laskaridis on "Twin Crises: Sovereign Debt and Climate."
The simultaneous sovereign debt and climate emergency raises significant problems with respect to how mitigation and adaptation will be paid for, the role of cross-country transfers, and the range of policy instruments that can be used, including green credit ratings, sustainability-linked sovereign bonds and debt-for-nature swaps. The talk will provide students a thorough understanding of growing debt crises unfolding across the world, focusing on specific country case studies and elements of the international financial and monetary system (IFMS). The talk will critically examine aspects of global economic governance, as well shortcomings of the global financial safety net, that is supposed to underpin and provide a backstop to the international financial and monetary system during a crisis. The talk will critically examine the policies undertaken since Covid by key policy actors such as the DSSI, the Common Framework, and new allocation of SDR, and examine other policy pathways for a more just resolution to the debt and climate emergency.
Christina Laskaridis is Assistant Professor in Economics at the Open University, UK, and a visiting Fellow of St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. Her thesis Debt sustainability: towards a history of theory, policy and measurement received the 2022 Joseph Dorfman Best Dissertation prize by the History of Economics Society. She is leading a grant on Environment-related financial risks and regulatory capital requirements funded by INSPIRE (International Network for Sustainable Financial Policy Insights, Research and Exchange) at the LSE. Christina’s research interests include the political economy of sovereign debt, international organisations and monetary and debt debates and how these intersect with the growing climate emergency. Christina uses her expertise to advise on debt and development issues, such as to the OHCHR’s Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights, UNCTAD, the Overseas's Development Institute, and several NGOs working on sovereign debt issues.
