Risking carbon capital: Reporting infrastructures and the making of financial climate risks

This paper elucidates the infrastructural work of rendering 'climate risks' intelligible and actionable for financial investors. It analyses hybrid public-private initiatives to 'risk' carbon capital which accompany strategies to 'de-risk' green investments in the effort to make financial flows climate compatible. Empirically, the paper focusses on recent attempts to establish a 'global baseline' for climate reporting. I analyse these efforts as the building of a reporting infrastructure: a socio-technical network that brings together metrics, calculative devices and reporting conventions, and articulates actors like companies, investors, regulators and auditors according to its protocols. The infrastructure provides a conduit of power that can serve the interests of different actors and exercises ontological power by making up 'climate risk' in an economically digestible yet partial way. I will thus criticize that the focus on financial climate risks backgrounds the material risks of global heating.