Which is why we welcome the work that the Commission will do on developing a taxonomy for the sustainability of financial assets as part of their Sustainable Finance Action Plan. For our research, however we had to develop our own template for our financial sector to fill out. We sent this template to the three biggest banks, covering around 70-80% of the market.
What we found is that banks’ balance sheet consist of around 11% of exposures to carbon intensive industries. Not surprisingly, most of these exposures are through loans, which makes banks less sensitive to market fluctuations than for example pension funds. Moreover, most of these loans have maturities of less than five years, which should provide banks with sufficient scope to anticipate changes.