Banking Climate Alliance ends activities

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.

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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.

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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.

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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update that diluted its initial objective: “directives” had become simple “guidelines”, while “requirements” had been replaced by “recommendations”, according to internal documents consulted by AFP.

Translated from French by DeepL/mga

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