The politics of climate risk: How the climate issue is turned into a risk issue through the little tools and operations of finance

Stine Engen and Kristin Asdal

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2025, vol. 18, issue 4, 461-474

Abstract: The notion of ‘climate risk' has become key to how finance understands and manages the climate issue. This paper seeks to empirically trace the making of the climate-finance nexus through analyzing a so-called roadmap for the Norwegian financial sector as a tool that worked to turn the climate issue into a climate risk issue. We show how the roadmap follows the definition laid out by the influential TCFD, that renders climate change a risk for finance, due to extreme weather events, but also due to possible changing conditions for finance. This latter risk is the so-called ‘transition risks’ stemming from how governments may affect finance through climate policy. We show how the roadmap enables the entanglement of financial and climate concerns by acting both materially and conceptually on the climate issue. First, the roadmap moves the notion of climate risk into the political system. Second, it turns the climate issue into a risk issue that must be politically handled as a transition risk for finance. As such, we argue, the roadmap partakes in a process of financialization that aligns the climate issue with the concepts and needs of finance.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2370258

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