Mark Carney, the Fort Smith-born Governor of the Bank of England, has been handed a new job at the United Nations designed to raise money for action on climate change.
Carney, who lived in the Northwest Territories until he was six, is to become the UN’s next special envoy for climate action and finance once his term as Bank of England governor ends in January.
Prior to his current role, he governed the Bank of Canada from 2008 until 2013.
Carney was born in Fort Smith in 1965, the Globe and Mail reported in 2008. His father, Bob, was then the town’s school principal, later becoming an education administrator in the territory. (For his PhD in the 1970s, Bob Carney wrote a thesis exploring the role of governments and the Church in NWT education over the course of a century.)
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Carney junior’s new job – he’s now 54 – will involve getting the world’s financial institutions to invest in programs that work toward the Paris climate agreement’s target of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5C (above pre-industrial levels).
His immediate deadline is the 26th round of world climate talks, coming up in November 2020. His annual salary will be a symbolic $1.
Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, was the last person to hold the post.
Carney moved from the NWT to Edmonton at the age of six, graduating from Harvard before working at Goldman Sachs and the Canadian federal government.
He was reported to be “honoured” at receiving the UN role. His first day in the position will be January 31, 2020.
