jens weidmann : " green bond issuance and other forms of lowcarbon finance " - welcome and opening speech welcome and opening speech by dr jens weidmann, president of the deutsche bundesbank and chairman of the board of directors of the bank for international settlements, at the omfif global public investor symposium on " green bond issuance and other forms of low - carbon finance ", frankfurt am main, 13 july 2017. * * * 1. introduction ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to welcome you all to the bundesbank. for those of you who are here for the first time, i would like to mention that this building serves as our regional office in hesse. located at the heart of frankfurt ’ s financial district and equipped with all the necessary facilities, it has become a venue of choice for conferences and other business conventions. those of you who have been here on a previous occasion may have noticed that the artistic features in this building are all related to johann wolfgang von goethe, the famous poet and a son of this city. when the building was planned, various artists were explicitly commissioned to depict scenes from his drama “ faust part two ". the drama deals with issues such as the creation of paper money and the consequences of uncontrolled growth in the money supply – issues which are obviously very much at home in a central bank. goethe may have been inspired to tackle these topics by his professional experience as finance minister of the ( highly indebted ) duchy of saxe - weimar. a less well - known fact about goethe is that he was also very interested in meteorology, and even did some research in this field. his goal was to find a relationship between cloud formation, wind direction and other weather phenomena. in contrast to his literary work, his studies were nevertheless widely ignored by the experts in this field of science. climate change and, in particular, man - made climate change was not a topic in goethe ’ s time – neither in natural sciences nor in finance. but i am sure he would have devoted his attention to it if it had been. given his financial expertise, he would certainly have been interested in the question how public investors can help combat climate change and how capital might be allocated to low - carbon investments in order to improve overall welfare. in my welcome remarks i would like to touch upon the g20 policies on green finance and the promotion of green finance. 2. g20 policies on green finance global warming is among the greatest

deliver a broad based assessment of economic developments in the arab economies but rather as an economist i will stick to the principle of comparative advantage and as a central banker i will concentrate on the issue of monetary integration. it is an issue that plays an important role in the current policy agenda in many countries on the arab peninsula. and it is an issue where i can draw on our own european experiences to exemplify the terms on which a european - arab dialogue can be established. the regional monetary integration initiative is, in my view, a quite astonishing development that does not get the attention it deserves. in fact, in economic terms, it is the second most important monetary integration initiative in the world economy. with its plan to introduce a monetary union in 2010 the economies of the gulf cooperation council ( gcc ) endeavour on a project that is surpassed only by the european monetary integration. this development is of interest to germany and europe for a number of reasons. firstly, the six gcc member countries bahrain, kuwait, oman, qatar, saudi arabia and the united arab emirates are by far the most important trading partners for germany in the arab world, accounting for nearly 55 % of german exports to the arab region in 2004. secondly, the debate about the benefits of monetary integration and the attempt to build regional currency blocks has become much more attractive since the successful launch of the single monetary policy in europe. so europe ’ s experiences after over six years of the common currency might be of interest to those economies currently endeavouring into closer monetary and financial integration. this, of course, is not to say that the example of the euro area can and should be uncritically carried over to other regions with different economic structure, cultural background and political systems. nevertheless, there are distinct pre - conditions necessary for the functioning of a currency union that are common to each and every project of closer monetary cooperation – even though the recognition of the empirical truth that a “ one size fits all ” approach is not doing justice to the many projects of regional economic and monetary cooperation throughout the globe. 1 thirdly, in that context the proper functioning of emu has been questioned in some camps over recent weeks. in cases where this might have created some irritations in other parts of the world which are less familiar with what is going on in emu some brief comments are necessary to put things in a proper perspective. please let me start with the latter point. without any doubt, one of the major institutional changes in the international financial system in