Do Central Banks Take Climate Change Seriously?

The paper separates two channels of central-bank communication. Speeches show what central banks say to the public and to specialist audiences. Meeting records show what committees put into the formal account of monetary-policy deliberation. The difference matters because rates are not set in speeches.

The motivating case is the Bank of England after Mark Carney's 2015 climate speech. The paper finds that detailed Monetary Policy Committee transcripts for 2015-2017 contain no climate discussion, even though the same institution publicly helped put climate risk on the global central-banking agenda.

The cross-country evidence shows that this is not simply a Bank of England anomaly. Climate is discussed in speeches much more readily than in formal meeting records, and when it enters those records it is translated into mandate language: inflation, financial stability, and policy instruments.

In the common 26-institution sample, climate is not uniquely excluded, but it appears much less readily in meeting records than in speeches.

Research question

Does climate change enter the official monetary-policy record, or is it mainly present in public central-bank speeches?

Why it matters

Central banks influence climate-related financial risk through supervision, collateral policy, asset purchases, and financial-stability interpretation. The paper asks whether climate has crossed into the formal monetary-policy record where decisions are explained.

Data and method

Data

The paper compares more than 37,000 central-bank speeches from 136 institutions with 3,593 usable official meeting records from 26 central banks across 14 languages. It benchmarks climate against inequality, digitalisation, and geopolitical risk.

Method

The study uses multilingual text classification, strict verification of climate references, channel comparisons within the same institutional sample, lag measures from first speech mention to first meeting-record mention, and topic-linkage coding for inflation, financial stability, and policy instruments.

Findings

1. Climate is filtered

   In the common 26-institution sample, climate is not uniquely excluded, but it appears much less readily in meeting records than in speeches.

2. Many records never mention climate

   Half of central banks publishing meeting records never mention climate in that record.

3. Entry is slow

   Among institutions that eventually mention climate in meeting records, the median lag from first climate speech to first recorded mention is 18 years.

4. Mandate translation

   When climate appears in meeting records, it is framed chiefly through inflation, financial stability, and policy instruments.

The paper contributes an official-record test of central-bank climate seriousness. It shifts the question from whether central banks talk about climate to whether climate is admitted into the monetary-policy record and under what language.

Figures and tables

Scope and limits

The paper studies speeches and authorised meeting records, not every supervisory, research, or internal-policy channel. Absence from meeting records should not be read as absence from the institution as a whole.

How to cite

@article{kansoy2026climate,
  title   = {Do Central Banks Take Climate Change Seriously?},
  author  = {Fatih Kansoy},
  journal = {Working paper},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://fatih.ai/climate_central_banks.pdf}
}

Selected references

1. Blinder, A. S., Ehrmann, M., Fratzscher, M., De Haan, J., and Jansen, D.-J. 2008. Central bank communication and monetary policy.
2. Carney, M. 2015. Breaking the tragedy of the horizon.
3. Campiglio, E., Deyris, J., Romelli, D., and Scalisi, G. 2025. Warning words in a warming world.
4. Schoenmaker, D. 2021. Greening monetary policy.
5. Lastra, R. M. Mission creep, democratic accountability and central bank independence.