One year after publishing the first Met Coal Exit List (MCEL) for the finance industry, the German NGO Urgewald has just published its first update. (1) MCEL 2026 identifies 273 met coal expansion projects over 20 countries, representing 580 million tons per year of planned new and expanded capacity. This is an increase of 21 projects since last year. In contrast just 14 of the 318 of the major financial institutions included have policies tackling this issue. To respect climate imperatives and help solve the health crisis linked to coal pollution, major banks, insurers and investors must use the updated MCEL as a reference to immediately exclude developers of metallurgical coal.
A sister database to the Global Coal Exit List (2), focusing on thermal coal, MCEL 2026 identifies 145 parent companies and more than 200 subsidiaries worldwide that are expanding their met coal mining activities.
Met coal is mainly used in traditional blast furnace steelmaking, which remains a major driver of climate pollution, accounting for around 11% of global CO2 emissions. (3) Met coal represents almost 13% of total coal production. (4)
Companies are accelerating met coal expansion plans…
In its latest report on coal, the International Energy Agency reiterated its forecast of a decline in demand for met coal this decade: “Looking ahead, global met coal demand is forecast to decline gradually (from 1,114 Mt in 2025) to 1,061 Mt by 2030”. (5) One reason for this predicted decline is that green steel is becoming increasingly economically viable.
But the met coal industry is rushing to expand supply, with more projects in more countries planned than last year. If these projects go ahead, they will increase global annual met coal production by 52%, an increase on the 50% seen in MCEL 2025. (1)
These projects will have immediate and devastating impacts on nearby communities and the local environment, on top of their climate impact. In British Columbia, Canada, for instance, Glencore, one of the world’s largest mining and commodities companies, uses a method known as mountaintop removal, which involves blasting off entire mountaintops to expose coal seams. This technique leaves a long-term legacy of contamination and habitat loss, harming the landscape and water resources for centuries. (6) Despite all this, major European banks such as Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, ING, Santander, BBVA, UBS, Standard Chartered, HSBC and Barclays continued financing Glencore in 2024 and early 2025.
Financial institutions slow to adopt met coal policies
According to the latest data from the Banking on Climate Chaos report, the top 65 major banks in the world channeled more than US 39 billion dollars to companies with met coal expansion plans from 2021 to 2024. (7)
There was some progress in the past year: after the Swiss insurer Zurich in 2024, the Finnish pension fund Ilmarinen decided to divest from all met coal developers recently. (8) The Science Based Targets initiative’s newest Net-Zero Standard for Financial Institutions adopted last July also now explicitly recommends the exclusion of metallurgical coal developers, referencing MCEL. (9)
But the pace of the adoption of policies on met coal is tragically slow, with only 14 major financial institutions out of the 318 covered in the Coal Policy Tracker tackling this issue so far. That breaks down to eleven banks, one insurer and two asset managers. (10) The Australian bank Macquarie even backtracked fully from its commitments on metallurgical coal in May 2025. (11)
Most of banks‘ policies only cover the direct financing of met coal projects, while the vast majority of the financing goes through general corporate finance. This is the case for the French bank BNP Paribas, which has increased its general financing to met coal developers in 2024, even though it excludes new met coal mines‘ projects according to its policy.
Met coal can be up to three times more polluting than thermal coal in terms of climate changing emissions. (12) This means it is more than high time for financial institutions to cover this type of coal and immediately exclude all met coal developers from their financial services.
MCEL, now used by more than 150 financial institutions worldwide, is the perfect tool to implement such exclusions.
