Keynote speech by Frank Elderson, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, at the ECB Legal Conference

Frankfurt am Main, 4 September 2023

Introduction

It is a pleasure to welcome you to Frankfurt and to the ECB’s Legal Conference. Arriving this morning and seeing such a large gathering of lawyers – attentive, curious and pleased to see old friends again – I am reminded of the “back-to-school” feeling after the summer.

I hope my intervention today can channel that energy towards the major challenge of our time: the climate and environmental crises. After all, summers now are very different from those we may remember from our youth.

Some Europeans faced hell this summer. Record-breaking heatwaves scorched the Mediterranean. Forest fires claimed lives and destroyed homes in Greece. And residents in northern Italy and central Europe were hit by extreme flooding. Meanwhile, similar disasters have been unfolding worldwide….