CNP Assurances takes advantage of the first anniversary of the Paris Financial center declaration on a green and sustainable finance to announce a coal exit plan. We can congratulate CNP Assurances: unlike Société Générale, who just announced a very incomplete policy that remains miles away from a coal exit, it understood and followed the instruction.
While it previously did little more than acknowledge it, CNP assurances now commits to reduce to zero the coal exposure of its investment portfolios by 2030 in the EU and the OECD and by 2040 elsewhere. To reach this objective, CNP adopts several criteria.
- Logically, CNP Assurances excludes all new investments in companies that develop new coal projects (power plants, mines, or infrastructures).
- Because we need to fast-forward the coal phase-out, with about 78% in coal power capacity to close before 2030, CNP will not invest in companies that are significantly involved in the sector. It will exclude all companies that get more than 10% of their revenues from coal, that have a coal power capacity of more than 5GW or that product more than 10 million tones of coal a year. As of now, CNP starts disinvesting from companies that get more than 20% of their revenues from coal.
- Because we need to push the remaining companies to progressively close their coal asset, CNP commits to regularly review its thresholds to reach zero and to ask companies to publish, by 2021, a coal exit plan aligned with its previously mentioned coal exit targets and relying on the closing – not selling – of all coal assets.
- To ensure that these plans are adopted and carried out, CNP will engage with companies.
Hats off to CNP! The policy approaches perfection and CNP becomes the 10th French financial actor to adopt a robust coal exit policy.