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Bloomberg
NatWest Group Plc said it will lend 100 billion pounds ($136 billion) to customers cutting carbon emissions by the end of 2025.
The British bank said it will focus on projects that help the UK move towards a net-zero economy with products including sustainability bonds and lending to firms that can show they are mostly low-carbon.
NatWest has previously pledged to halve the emissions it finances by the end of the decade and meet net zero targets by 2050. It exceeded its 2019 target to lend 20 billion pounds in climate and sustainable funding and financing earlier this year. The commitment comes ahead of upcoming global COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Investors in European banks are finally getting a sense of which firms are most at risk from the upheaval that climate change is bringing to the
financial landscape.
A study by Jefferies Financial Group shows that Commerzbank was potentially the European bank most exposed to greenhouse gas emitters last year. Details of analysis, which were shared with Bloomberg News, offer one of the most comprehensive investigations of the subject yet.
ShareAction, a UK-based nonprofit, says 20 of 25 European banks it studied have committed to net-zero emissions from their loan portfolios by 2050. But when it comes to the more pressing 2030 goal of reduce
emissions by half, only Lloyds, NatWest Group and Nordea Bank Abp have made pledges.
This year, banks appear to be taking climate change more seriously and a number have published emissions reduction targets ahead of the COP26 summit in November.
Investors so far have had little to go on when trying to figure out which banks risk the biggest fallout from a hotter planet apart from the amount of financing they provide to fossil fuel companies.
Firms that rate issuers on environmental, social and governance risks have been faulted for taking inconsistent approaches. Banks have started revealing their plans to cut lending to high-carbon sectors, but such data aren’t comparable across the industry. And European lenders won’t be required to disclose the ratio of green assets on their books until the end of next year.
ShareAction, a UK-based nonprofit, says 20 of the 25 European banks it studied have committed to net-zero emissions from their loan portfolios by 2050. But when it comes to the more pressing 2030 goal of reducing emissions by half, only Lloyds Banking Group Plc, NatWest Group Plc and Nordea Bank Abp have made pledges.