Samira Barzin and Alexander Wollenweber (Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford) will be presenting their work as part of a workshop on “Aligning Sovereign Finance with Nature”.
About this session: Over the past decade, links between economics, public finance, and climate change have gained substantial attention across academics and policy makers—but the global crises of nature and natural capital loss and their economic risks remain largely overlooked. This seminar introduces new methodological and data-driven advances exploring the systemic risk that nature loss poses to sovereign finance, and how innovative data financial instruments can be designed to support nature-aligned economic outcomes.
A. Wollenweber et al. (2025): In order to understand the financial consequences of nature loss for countries’ sovereign borrowing costs, we employ a quantile panel fixed effects and system GMM regressions across 28 advanced and 25 developing countries over the 1995-2020 period. Our results highlight the asymmetric macro-criticality of nature loss and biodiversity degradation, with disproportionally higher effect magnitudes and persistence for countries and groups with already elevated sovereign risk.
S. Barzin et al. (2025): Many countries at high risk of sovereign debt crises are also those with substantial economic challenges, where limited fiscal space systemically and crucially stifles development progress. At the same time, economic growth often drives environmental degradation. The LEON project aims to use satellite data to create transparent, nature-related KPIs for sovereign finance tools that strengthen fiscal capacity and support economic development while protecting natural capital. This talk will explore how spatial data innovation can enable sustainable sovereign finance.
When: Monday 24th of November
12.00-15.00 Light lunch, networking, followed by two talks and Q&A.
Where: CRASSH meeting room (Alison Richards Building) on the Sidgwick site.
Lunch: A light lunch will be provided, but bring along your drink of choice!
Zoom: You can also join us virtually on Zoom.
The weekly climaTRACES workshops, organised by Kamiar Mohaddes and Henning Zschietzschmann, are attended by a diverse group of people from economics, geography, politics, engineering, business, earth sciences, natural sciences, and history, generating interdisciplinary discussion. One person leads the session, on either a paper they have written, a work in progress, or just an idea they have and would like feedback on. This is also an opportunity for people to find our more about the team on what climaTRACES have been up to and what future events and research projects are being developed.