But the Isuru Project was able to maintain its recovery rate at 97%, because its beneficiaries could not be lured by the short-term gain offered by the loan forgiveness. 6  BIS Review 22/2008  to men. As a result, the overall women’s participation in the project remained as high as 70% throughout the project period. They played a very active role in all areas of project work including training, saving, borrowing and taking leadership. It was observed that women were better participants due to several reasons. First, they had the patience to go through the hectic but the rewarding long process of beneficiary development laid down by the project. Second, they had the best interest of their families throughout the period and did not waver after they had begun their move along the prosperity path. Third, women were better savers and also better borrowers with a pronounced reluctance to be branded as loan defaulters. Fourth, their high academic standards enabled them to carry out different functions involving accounts record keeping. Fifth, unlike men who got into social vices when the income level went up, women remained permanently committed to the family and the project. Sixth, they had the leadership ability dormant with them and the project was able to bring out that competency to the fore. As a result, all the leading roles in the project were played by women who formed the majority 23 .
A huge amount of work has already been done: the recommendations of the FSB’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) provide a comprehensive and consistent basis for the voluntary disclosure of information about risks. In addition, I propose that we identify European best practices, and move gradually towards a compulsory transparency requirement in Europe, provided that two conditions are met in order to avoid overburdening financial institutions: this requirement should be based on (i) a “comply or explain” principle and on (ii) a common taxonomy with a sufficiently broad level of aggregation. France already requires by law13 that asset managers, banks and insurance companies publish information about the way they take climate change into account. On top of that, we should develop forward-looking carbon stress tests for both insurance companies and banks – what I call “the video of risks”. It is obviously a complex and difficult task, but it is essential. Today we are able to perform sensitivity analyses to ascertain the size of probable losses for financial institutions’ portfolios under a range of economic scenarios. But one of our duties in the NGFS will be to carry out additional work on two key issues: (i) how to translate climate change scenarios into economic scenarios that can be used in our stress testing frameworks, and (ii) assessing the impact of shocks on the probability of default over a much longer horizon than the usual one of one year. 2.