The world’s biggest banks, insurers and money managers are under pressure from the public, politicians and their shareholders to commit to long term climate goals. Some have already affirmed that they will align their financing with the 2015 Paris Agreement and its goal of a 1.5 degree Celsius cap on climate change. Many more announcements of this type are likely to follow over the coming year in the build up to the UN climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland in late 2021, which are supposed to have a focus on finance. However it is…

As the climate crisis continues to escalate and the pressure is mounting on the financial industry to divest, Euromoney recently awarded the title of 'Best Bank in the World' to JPMorgan Chase, and the 'World's Best Bank for Sustainable Finance 2020' to HSBC. Over 20 organisations from across the world issued a letter to Euromoney calling on the magazine to acknowledge their oversight and set the bar higher. Read the letter to Euromoney here. Johan Frijns, Director BankTrack, part of the Fund Our Future network says: ''It’s…

As rainforests across the tropics face another year of devastating fires, a new report from Friends of the Earth shows that largest U.S. asset managers, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard – known as the Big Three – have explicitly undermined efforts by consumer brands and agribusiness companies to halt deforestation. The new report, Doubling Down on Deforestation, reveals that the Big Three collectively hold shares worth almost $700 billion in consumer brands with supply chain links to rainforest destruction, and tens of billions…

UniCredit has just published a policy explaining how the bank intends to meet its commitment to exit the coal sector by 2028, as announced in August 2020. According to the Coal Policy Tool, the policy includes substantial exclusion and engagement criteria that will allow the Italian bank to effectively cut all services to the expansion of the coal sector and progressively phase-out its exposure to bring it to close to zero by 2028. UniCredit is becoming the 16th financial institution with a high-quality coal policy, after 15 French financial institutions…

Reclaim Finance, in partnership with 26 other NGOs (1), is releasing the first online tool to identify, assess, and compare the policies adopted by financial institutions worldwide to restrict or end their financial services to the coal sector (2). The Coal Policy Tool rates the coal sector policies of 214 financial institutions on a consistent and transparent scoring grid built upon five key criteria; it also names the largest banks, re/insurers, asset owners and asset managers that have not begun…