The WWF Sustainable Financial Regulations and Central Bank Activities Assessment 2025 (SUSREG 2025) highlights that while some central banks and financial regulators are making important strides, key drivers of nature loss—including land, freshwater, and sea use changes, climate change, and pollution—remain insufficiently addressed in financial regulation and supervision. The fifth edition of WWF’s Greening Financial Regulation Initiative evaluates how climate, nature, and social risks are integrated into central banking, financial regulation, and supervision globally.
SUSREG 2025 emphasizes the urgent need to integrate nature-related risks more fully, activate macroprudential tools, and align capital rules with environmental impact while establishing clear frameworks for transition plan disclosures. With less than five years remaining to achieve global climate, nature, and development goals by 2030, decisive regulatory action is essential to guide the financial sector toward a net-zero, nature-positive, and socially equitable future.
The report notes progress among certain central banks and financial regulators in Europe and the Global South, including Bank Negara Malaysia, the European Central Bank, and institutions in Colombia, Morocco, Paraguay, and Türkiye. Notably, Hungary’s Central Bank (MNB) expanded its climate-related financial disclosure framework to explicitly include ecosystem and biodiversity risks, using the WWF Risk Filter Suite to assess nature-related risks in foreign exchange reserves and monetary policy portfolios. These examples demonstrate that meaningful improvements are achievable with strong supervisory follow-up.
However, SUSREG 2025 identifies critical gaps. Major nature-related risks, such as biodiversity loss, ocean degradation, and water stress, are largely overlooked in financial regulation, unlike climate risks which are treated with greater rigor. Macroprudential tools remain underused, supervisory enforcement of climate and nature risk standards is weak, and green taxonomies often fail to redirect capital without mandatory disclosures.
The report provides actionable recommendations for financial authorities, including embedding nature into monetary policy and supervision, deploying macroprudential tools such as stress tests and capital buffers, reinforcing disclosure and transition plans, adjusting capital rules to account for environmental harm, mobilizing green and transition finance, and improving national and international coordination through green finance committees and cross-jurisdictional knowledge-sharing platforms.
WWF leaders underline the urgency of acting now. Maud Abdelli highlighted that central banks and financial supervisors must ensure climate and nature risks are properly identified, priced, and managed, particularly as global negotiations fall short on phasing out fossil fuels and halting deforestation. Siti Kholifatul Rizkiah emphasized that early intervention is crucial, as ignoring environmental risks undermines both financial stability and emerging green opportunities.
WWF’s Greening Financial Regulation Initiative, launched in 2021, benchmarks central banks and financial supervisors on integrating environmental and social risks into financial policies and practices. The 2025 SUSREG assessment covers 50 central banking jurisdictions, 46 for insurance, and 12 capital markets, representing over 89% of global GDP and 75% of global emissions. This year, the scope expanded to include capital markets and introduced a focus on deforestation, freshwater, and ocean health, highlighting the increasing importance of nature-related risks and the threat of ecosystem tipping points for financial stability.
