Barely three months after retiring from his place as Singapore’s central financial institution chief, Ravi Menon shall be rejoining the civil service because the city-state’s first ambassador for local weather motion.
Along with this newly created position, he has additionally been appointed a senior advisor on the Nationwide Local weather Change Secretariat (NCCS) underneath the Prime Minister’s Workplace, the place he’ll characterize the nation at worldwide local weather discussions and advise on nationwide local weather coverage.
In line with the company’s press launch, Menon shall be tasked with driving public-private partnerships throughout the native enterprise neighborhood “to assist them seize alternatives to achieve a low-carbon future.”
Menon served as managing director of the Financial Authority of Singapore (MAS) since 2011 and stepped down in January, making him the republic’s longest-serving central banker. He has since been succeeded by former deputy Chia Der Jiun.
Below his management, Menon helped to spearhead most of the nation’s sustainable finance initiatives. These embrace launching one of many world’s first taxonomies to outline what counts as “transition” investments, establishing a coalition to develop a novel class of carbon credit in assist of early coal phase-outs and establishing a blended finance platform to reinforce the bankability of inexperienced and transition initiatives in Asia.
He additionally leveraged Singapore’s rising fintech capabilities to enhance the transparency and high quality of ESG knowledge by way of Undertaking Greenprint, which has since been spun off as an unbiased platform that goals to simplify sustainability reporting for small and medium enterprises.
In 2022, Menon concurrently served because the chair of the Community for Greening the Monetary System (NGFS), a community of over 120 central banks and monetary supervisors dedicated to scaling up inexperienced finance, till his retirement.
On a panel on the COP28 local weather summit in Dubai final yr, Menon mentioned that his “high want” for scaling local weather investments is for governments worldwide to implement the “proper worth” for carbon, which he put at round US$100 per tonne. This is able to imply that financing mechanisms like blended finance and carbon credit, that are used to decrease the price of capital for power transition initiatives, are pointless, he mentioned.
Whereas Singapore, which is the primary Southeast Asian nation to place a worth on carbon, is predicted to lift carbon taxes over the following few years, Menon remarked that this enhance is “not fairly enought” and “must go even greater”.
Town-state’s carbon tax elevated to S$25 (US$19) this yr and can rise to S$45 (US$34) in 2026 earlier than reaching S$50 to S$80 (US$37-60) per tonne by the top of the last decade.
