Bank of Portugal governor says efforts still need to be ‘measured’ to combat climate change

The Governor of the Bank of Portugal said this Monday that more data needs to be collected and more analysis carried out in the fight against climate change, given that measuring these efforts is essential to avoid disappointing people.

At Banco de Portugal’s “Connect to Data” conference for European Statistics Day, aimed at students and broadcast on the central bank’s YouTube channel, Mário Centeno highlighted the importance of data collection and analysis in modern economies and societies and asked when More efforts need to be made in this area, he believed that more work needs to be done to collect, analyze and disseminate data related to combating climate change.

“We have made enormous efforts to become much more environmentally friendly, but we need to measure those efforts, the progress that those efforts bring,” he said in his speech, believing that having this knowledge “is necessary in order not to cause disappointment in people”. “who may feel that nothing is being done on this topic due to ignorance of the data.

Therefore, according to Centeno, in the fight against climate change, it is necessary to collect more data, analyze information and disseminate it, and central banks play a fundamental role in this role because they have “more time, resources and expertise.”

Centeno stressed that the advantage of the central bank is precisely that it can spend more time on this fundamental work, and compared this to when it owned the financial portfolios of the governments of PS António Costa.

“When I was finance minister, I was afraid, going up the steps of the Ministry of Finance, that when I came to my office, the issue would have already passed the deadline for resolution,” he said, highlighting the “completely different pace” of the Bank of Portugal and, like him , are required to “deliver to society the results of the work” they do every day.

“This is work of the highest quality and it needs to be constantly reviewed,” he said.

At the same conference, economist João Cesar das Neves, a professor at the Catholic University, said that data is “very dangerous” and that it is easy to “play tricks” by manipulating or even falsifying data. He cited the example of Thomas Malthus, who in the 19th century predicted catastrophic population growth based on false data.

Cesar das Neves also said that when the government publishes a draft national budget, as it did this month, he locks himself at home for five hours and makes the same calculations every year, and as a result his analysis differs from that of other stakeholders. in public opinion, because, according to him, it is not chasing the data that is now being talked about.

According to the professor, despite talking so much about data, in fact, “nobody wants data, they want wisdom” and recalled the pyramid of knowledge, in which data is at the base, then information, then knowledge and at the top wisdom. .

“Data is raw material, there’s a lot of data, tons of data, but most of it is junk,” he said.

According to Cesar das Neves, when he started his career, the only source he used was the Bank of Portugal, since it was of much higher quality than the Ministry of Finance or the National Institute of Statistics, and since then all these organizations have achieved a very high level . important journey and that this Monday in Portugal “technical quality [dos dados das instituições públicas] everything is fine, the data is reliable.”

Even government budget information, he said, “was a scam” a few years ago and has “improved significantly,” helping to create structures such as the Council of Public Finance (CFP) and the Budget Technical Assistance Office (BTAO).

However, the economist used the conference to criticize Banco de Portugal, finding that “the quality of the data has increased amazingly, the knowledge has increased” but the information it provides has decreased. A few years ago, he said, when he wanted to propose publications for understanding the Portuguese economy, he proposed the Statistical Bulletin, the Monthly Economic Review and other publications in the Annual Bulletin, and that this Monday the Bank of Portugal has thousands of series in BPstat, but “declined data selection”.

“I miss it and I don’t want to stop saying it,” said Joao Cesar das Neves, adding that in the future what appears on alcoholic drink labels should appear next to the words “Drink in moderation.”