Irene Monasterolo, PhD, is Professor of Climate Finance at EDHEC Business School and EDHEC-Risk Institute in Nice (FR) and senior research fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria) and Boston University (USA), as well as visiting scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria). Irene holds a PhD in Agri-food economics and statistics from the University of Bologna (IT) and two post doctoral experiences in Cambridge (UK) and Boston University (USA), on climate finance.

Irene’s research is contributing to understand the role of finance in the achievement of the climate targets in both high income and developing countries, and the assessment of climate-financial risks and opportunities in the low-carbon transition. She has co-developed the climate stress-test of the financial system, which embeds climate scenarios in asset pricing and investors’ risk assessment, and was published in Nature Climate Change and Science. The Climate Stress test methodology included in the CLIMAFIN tool has been applied by several (public and private) financial institutions to assess investors’ exposure to climate physical and transition risks.

Irene has also co-developed the EIRIN Stock-Flow Consistent macro-financial model to analyse the implications of climate policies (fiscal, monetary, prudential) on green investments, financial stability and inequality. Currently, with the EIRIN model, Irene is supporting the World Bank in the analysis of the macro-financial criticality of compounding COVID-19 and climate risk ,and is collaborating with the European Central Bank at the analysis of the double materiality of climate risk in the EU economy and banking sector (forthcoming as European Central Bank working paper).

Irene is contributing to the G24 V20 countries’ Task Force on Climate, Development, and the IMF led by Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, as well as to the World Bank’s Crisis Risk Analytics project of the Global Risk Financing Facility aimed to assess the macroeconomic and financial implications of compounding COVID-19 and climate physical risks.

Irene’s research has been published on leading academic journals, such as Science and Nature Climate Change, as well as on non-academic journals (e.g. Le Monde, UNPRI). She has co-edited the first special issue on Climate Risks and Financial Stability (published on Journal of Financial Stability in 2021). Irene has co-authored the G20’s T-20 chapter on Sustainable Finance, and climate finance chapters of the Financial Stability Review of the European Insurance and Occupational Pension Authority (EIOPA) and of the Austrian National Bank (OeNB).

Role

She works in connection with the Societal Transition for a Sustainable Economy focus area.