Leveraging California’s Financial Clout For Climate Change

Thomas Heller and Alicia Seiger
Thomas Heller and Alicia Seiger

The Stanford Sustainable Finance Initiative, a group of 20 global energy and finance experts, and Stanford Law School’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance issued a groundbreaking report on how California can further address the growing budgetary implications posed by climate change. The advisory group, established by Governor Gavin Newsom to leverage the state’s role as an asset owner and investor to advance California’s climate leadership, delivered more than 45 infrastructure and financial disclosure recommendations focused on the state’s $262 billion operating budget and the combined $1 trillion in assets under management across the state’s three biggest pension funds.

“This report details how to practice climate risk disclosure in line with leading standards, the ways in which disclosure needs to evolve, and how disclosure fits into a comprehensive suite of climate policies,” said Alicia Seiger, co-chair of the advisory group and managing director of both the Stanford Sustainable Finance Initiative and the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. “The recommendations are particularly relevant in anticipation of the federal government’s infrastructure package and as the Securities and Exchange Commission contemplates its climate disclosure rulemaking.”

Students in SLS’s Climate Risk Disclosures policy lab contributed to the report’s final recommendations and presented their work for the co-authors and the SEC. And Bella Castrodale, JD ’22, helped research and draft portions of the report. The policy lab was co-taught by Seiger and Thomas Heller, Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Studies, Emeritus, and faculty director of the Steyer-Taylor Center, who also served on the advisory board for the report. SL