If the biggest banks on the planet were a country, they would be the world's top polluter. This is the analysis that emerges from “Unchecked, the CO2 Emissions of the World's Largest Banks,” the new report published by ReCommon released on the occasion of the ongoing G7 Finance in Stresa. According to the research commissioned by the association, based on information available at the end of 2022, the greenhouse gas emissions of the system banks of the G7 countries would amount to 2.7 billion tons, more than the emissions of Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom and France combined (a total of “only” 2 billion tons). Despite accounting for only 6 percent of the loans analyzed by the report, CO2-intensive sectors are responsible for more than half of the total emissions financed. Specifically, we are talking about so-called “financed emissions, which are the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a financial institution's financing and investments, industry sectors, projects and corporations that banks decide to support.”

While a growing number of banks provide climate-related data, most disclose only intensity parameters and do not disclose absolute emissions, making it difficult to have a complete and objective assessment of the carbon footprint of banks' financial activities. In light of this, as the researchers who oversaw the methodology behind the research point out, it is very important to keep in mind that the emissions figure found in the report is greatly underestimated due to the lack of transparency and poor disclosure practices by lending institutions, particularly those in the U.S. and Japan such as JPMorgan, Citigroup, Mizuho and SMFG.

It is no course that the banks of the U.S. and Japan, even according to data from the recent international study Banking on Climate Chaos compiled by the NGOs Banktrack, Urgewald and Reclaim Finance, among others, lead the world in terms of the global amount of financing to the fossil industry. They are especially munificent toward companies that are expanding their oil and gas production plans, to which $3.3 trillion has been allocated. While star-studded banks JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America excel in the absolute rankings, the ranking for new fossil projects sees, in addition to the ever-present leader JP Morgan, Japan's Mizuho Financial and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial take the podium. The Tokyo-based lenders' leap can be explained by their exposure in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector, which is growing especially in the U.S. (48 percent of LNG imported into the European Union in 2023 will come from there) after the start of the war in Ukraine.

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European banks, but do not hold a backseat position. Britain's Barclays, following closely behind its Japanese and U.S. counterparts, recently came under fire from environmental groups for being accused of misleading the public and investors by framing as environmentally “sustainable” its financial support for Italy's Eni, which is instead engaged in an expansion of a business based on the use and exploitation of fossil fuels. Barclays' financing to the six-legged dog amounts to four billion euros. Bnp Paribas, although committed to not supporting new mining projects, is the French lender most “friendly” to the fossil fuel business.

In general, the cosiddict “dirty dozen,” the global banks that have most foraged the fossil fuel industry from the Paris Agreement to date with more than $3.340 billion, correspond to lending institutions in the G7 countries analyzed in ReCommon's study. Unfortunately, the trend of financing, linked to that of emissions, is on the rise, and it should come as no surprise that after a season of seemingly greater environmental awareness on the part of banks, we find ourselves at a standstill, if not backward. Paradigmatic in this regard is the conduct of Bank of America, which in recent times has cancelled its policies that ruled out Arctic drilling and coal-fired thermal power plants, set no short-term absolute emissions targets, and abandoned the Equator Principles, a set of guidelines for assessing the social and environmental risk of financial activities.