ContextRemarks at the Joint Committee on Climate Change conference in Kuala Lumpur, with awards for green finance projects; Bank Negara Malaysia safeguards stability and is guiding banks through the low-carbon transition.
Why it mattersCalls for financing climate adaptation before disasters strike and for better climate data so banks can price risk.
- Climate and nature risks threaten the economy, and floods or landslides arrive before funding does.
- Rising data-centre demand strains the electricity supply.
- Climate data is thin, so uncertainty is hard to turn into measurable risk.
- Finance adaptation and resilience before the next disaster.
- Develop a pipeline of projects with risk-sharing structures and room for institutions to take responsible risks.
- Improve climate data availability and build capacity on nature-related risks.
Read the speech summary
1. Climate resilience as a financial issue
Closing the 2026 conference of Malaysia's Joint Committee on Climate Change, Bank Negara Malaysia Governor Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour argued that resilience to climate and nature risks is an economic and therefore financial priority, and offered three reflections.
2. Financing a credible energy transition
Renewables reached 31% of installed capacity in 2025, up from 25% in 2023, in line with the national roadmap, but AI and data centres, expected to use close to a third of electricity by 2035, will push demand sharply higher. Money exists; the bottleneck is turning it into bankable projects. His example: a remote town in Sabah running on a diesel generator next to a palm-oil mill whose methane could power it. Alone, such a project looks too small and unusual to finance, but with over 120 mills in the state it could become a model adding hundreds of megawatts. A climate finance platform has gathered 45 projects that together ask for over RM5 billion of funding, and he urges financiers to help them scale, and the central bank is studying how rules could give lenders room for well-managed, higher-risk transition financing.
3. Adaptation and nature
He wants money spent on resilience before floods or droughts rather than on repairs afterwards, supported by new national climate policies and better, more usable climate data so that uncertainty becomes priced risk. He also asks finance to value nature, on which over half of Malaysia's GDP depends, citing Singapore's choice to turn a concrete canal into a natural river park at half the cost. Banks can start assessing nature risks with existing resources, and he closes by calling for bolder capital, innovation and collaboration.