The Banking Climate Alliance announces the end of its activities
Keystone-SDA
The Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), the UN’s carbon neutrality programme for the banking sector, says it will cease its activities. Swiss bank UBS withdrew last August.
The NZBA was launched in 2021 as part of the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI) to encourage banks to take concrete steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their lending and investments and to play a key role in the transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
+ Swiss finance sector told to ‘green’ up its act
The context is now less favourable for climate protection in Europe and the United States.
At the beginning of August, UBS, one of the founding members, announced that it was withdrawing from the alliance, while hailing its “valuable role”. At the time, the bank stated its ambition to be a leading player in sustainability remained intact.
+ Is sustainable finance wishful thinking?
BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale, Crédit Mutuel, the BPCE group (comprising the Banques Populaires and the Caisses d’Epargne) and the Banque Postale were also part of this group, which at its peak counted nearly 150 members.
The alliance put its work on hold at the end of August pending the outcome of the vote.
+ The challenge of greening Swiss banks
A spokesperson said that banks around the world “can continue to use” the alliance’s work and guidelines, which can “help them to develop and implement their own plans for the transition to carbon neutrality”.
Defections over Atlantic
The club had suffered several defections since the end of last year, following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, who promised to “drill like crazy”, a phrase that has become one of his campaign slogans (“We will drill, baby, drill”).
Six major US banks left the NZBA in the aftermath: Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citi, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, followed by Canadian banks, including the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), and Japanese banks, such as Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Mizuho.
NZBA members had also scaled back their joint ambitions in the spring.
Under the guise of “flexibility”, the alliance had carried out a semantic update that diluted its initial objective: “directives” had become simple “guidelines”, while “requirements” had been replaced by “recommendations”, according to internal documents consulted by AFP.
More
More
Ex-US climate ambassador Kerry urges more green investing
Translated from French by DeepL/mga
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch.
