Financial Institutions transition plans

Reports

16 December 2024

Financial institutions do not finance “today’s economy”, they finance the economy of next year, of 2030, 2040 and the decades after. The services they provide enable companies to develop new projects, to launch products and to expand. A bank lending to a company helps it invest or continue operating and worries about its ability to repay the loan in the future. An investor voting at a general assembly is giving company leadership freedom to carry out its strategy, thus supporting it. An insurer providing coverage to a new infrastructure is considering future damages that could occur and ensuring the company can face them. In a word, financial institutions are shaping the economy of the future. But, if they model it like the one of the present they contribute to the perpetuation of a climate-wrecking status quo.

To chart a new course, we need a new map. Providing sufficient ambition, robustness and enforcement is ensured, climate transition plans can play that role. Indeed, transition plans are progressively becoming one of the main criteria to assess how financial companies tackle – or fail to tackle – climate change in their strategies. In this briefing, Reclaim Finance provides recommendations to build such robust financial climate transition plans.

Key elements:

  • The briefing lays out essential criteria regarding decarbonization targets, decarbonization strategies, engagement, reporting and governance and biodiversity and the just transition. This includes precise recommendations on emission and non-emission-based targets, sectoral policies and escalation strategies.
  • It also identifies “red lines” that represent major gaps and shortcomings in financial transition plans.
  • Considering the specificities of each type of financial institutions and potential constraints, the briefing includes an identification of which financial services provided by banks, asset managers, asset owners and (re)insurers should be immediately included and which can be added at a later stage.

Reclaim Finance calls on financial institutions to consider these recommendations when building their transition plans and on supervisors and policymakers to use them in designing transition planning requirements for the financial sector.