Banks call for global rules on climate risk

Common standards would help banks to factor climate risk into assessments and finance decarbonisation

Establishing a clear set of rules to account for companies’ exposure to climate risk is vital if banks are to play a bigger role in financing the global energy transition, according to a panel at the Climate Governance Initiative Global Summit on Tuesday. Such rules would help banks to better integrate climate risk when assessing the business cases of the companies they finance, for example making renewables more attractive and fossil fuels less so. “What we fear is that companies… will fail to focus on reducing emissions from their own activities and instead take the ‘easy option’ of purchasing offsets” Fahy, KBI Global Investors Multilateral development banks (MDBs) have led the wa