Introductory remarks by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the Climate, Nature and Monetary Policy Conference organised by the ECB, Frankfurt School and CETEX

Frankfurt am Main, 5 May 2026

It is a pleasure to open this conference on climate, nature and monetary policy – the first of its kind at the ECB and one that would have been hard to imagine even a decade ago.

Not because climate risk was unrecognised at the time. The scientific community had long been clear about its seriousness, and the Paris Agreement set a common direction of travel for governments, which carry the primary responsibility for tackling climate change.

Rather, the attention given to what climate change meant for central banks – in research and in policy – was still in its infancy. And where it did exist, it focused primarily on the consequences for financial stability, with landmark interventions as early as 2015.^[1]

The implications for monetary policy came into focus more slowly. For instance,…