This allows us to maintain the ambitious scope of the exercise, and gives firms enough time to engage with their customers and invest sufficiently in their capabilities to deliver to a high standard. We expect firms to make good use of this time. And to support that we will publish after the summer a ‘roadmap’ on how we will engage with and support firms in the period up to the launch of the stress test. As with disclosure and risk management, the stress test will not be a straightforward task. We will test risks under not one, but three scenarios. The first where no additional policy action is taken and where, by continuing on our current emissions path, warming exceeds 3 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The second where policy action starts now enabling us to achieve net-zero in an orderly fashion by 2050. And the third where policy is implemented late, leading to a disorderly transition to net-zero. 16  CFRF Guide 2020 The Financial Policy Committee’s July 2019 Financial Stability Report set out that there would be a climate change related Biennial Exploratory Scenario (BES) in 2021. A discussion paper on the climate BES was published in December 2019.
Leading the Change: Climate Action in the Financial Sector Speech given by Sarah Breeden, Executive Director, UK Deposit Takers Supervision Executive Sponsor for Climate change  UK Finance Webinar held during London Climate Action Week 1 July 2020  I am grateful to Zane Jamal and Theresa Löber for their assistance in drafting these remarks 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  Good afternoon everyone. I would like to thank UK Finance for inviting me to speak today during London Climate Action Week on what I consider to be the defining issue of our time – climate change. I realise that this may seem an odd claim for a central banker to make in the middle of a global pandemic that has already led to the largest fall in UK growth in over three hundred years.1 But our economy and financial system, with the right support, should eventually recover from Covid-19. In contrast, climate change, left unchecked, will lead to irreversible harm for generations to come. That demands our continued attention even as we deal with the current crisis. We are at the start of a critical decade for climate action where the decisions we take today will shape the future of our planet for decades to come. ‘Action’ being the key word. If the previous decade was marked by a ‘call to action’, then this coming decade must answer it. That means an economy-wide orderly transition to net-zero emissions. We all have a role to play in that.