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OIC banks can improve their climate impact by learning from the challenges of global banks
In the face of rising concerns over greenwashing, OIC banks have an opportunity to enhance their climate impact by learning from global banks' challenges. While the pace of responsible finance targets has quickened, so has the scrutiny from stakeholders and regulators. An analysis by RepRisk indicates that greenwashing risks for companies have fallen for the first time since 2019, highlighting the evolving landscape financial institutions must navigate. With an increasing emphasis on transparent and actionable climate targets, OIC banks can draw valuable insights from the Transition Pathways Initiative's (TPI) recent report on transition in the banking system, which underscores the importance of comprehensive target-setting and decarbonization planning.
The report sheds light on the pitfalls faced by larger banks, such as overly narrow climate targets and the lack of comprehensive disclosures on capital market activities. As OIC financial institutions and those in Islamic finance aim to decarbonize their portfolios, they must consider sectoral relevance, the materiality of emissions, and the integration of broader metrics like the Energy Supply Financing Ratio. Ultimately, the focus should shift from merely disclosing targets to implementing strategies that drive real-world economic changes, thereby aligning with global efforts to limit warming and promote a Just Transition.
Financial institutions need to identify what impact they want to have on climate, nature & Just Transition
Financial institutions looking to make progress on their climate, nature and ESG priorities have seen expectations rise from investors, regulators, customers, and other stakeholders. No longer can they just release a sustainability report with glossy photos that highlight their community involvement. Financial institutions are now expected to lay out a clear strategy and show progress on implementing it, with a Just Transition plan to mitigate any adverse social impacts that could result.
It will be important to set out a set of adaptable principles to support decision-making. It will not be enough to have decisions guided only by data; they will also have to be guided by a positive objective that takes into consideration a much wider range of impacts besides just financial impacts on companies, investors and financial institutions.
During a recent MIFC Leadership Council event in London, Sultan of Perak Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah highlighted that improving transparency through disclosure can be a catalyst for change, but Islamic finance should go beyond this. He specifically called out “the fulfilment of the higher social and humane objectives captured by the concept of Maqasid al-Shariah” and the need “to avert harm and to promote benefit”.
As financial institutions apply the new data sources, they will need to balance two key constraints inherent in the data. On the one hand, they will face mandatory requirements that stipulate specific methods for calculating the data they disclose. Banks will have to invest in technology to help collect, manage, analyze and report on mandated climate disclosures, which will result in single-point estimates of data such as Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions for customer activities or similar metrics for nature loss.
The over-reliance on data (only) can lead financial flows astray, especially if these quantitative requirements are hard-coded into regulation. Financial institutions will always have some regulations they must follow, regardless of the outcomes they produce. In most cases, however, the regulation will not be as black-and-white and will allow for business judgment by financial institutions.
The Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) released guidance for investors to use asset-level Scope 3 emissions data that includes the recommendation that “without qualitative context, in the current data landscape, taking a blanket approach to Scope 3 across an investment portfolio could risk incentivising decision-making that is not necessarily aligned with mitigation of climate change and its associated financial risks.”
Climate change mitigation is not just about reducing emissions, it is about doing so in a way that syncs with commitments to reverse nature loss and produce a Just Transition. The decision-making process of banks and investors needs to address all three objectives (climate mitigation, reversing nature loss, and a Just Transition) using information about the qualitative context behind the climate data they use, and more importantly within a decision-making process that places value on the outcomes.
The full story of climate data for financial institutions isn’t just the numbers
The Network for Greening the Financial System has released a detailed overview of the state of emissions data and ways to improve them. It is much more important than it may appear at first glance. That’s because measurement and reporting are designed to guide how the data are being used, but no single metric or methodology provides a complete guide to Net Zero or Paris-alignment.
The purpose of climate disclosures is to help users of its reporting to evaluate the degree to which the entity is protecting itself against future risks associated with its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from climate change, nature loss, and the achievement or failure to see through a Just Transition. The numbers only tell one part of that story, even if they are perfectly consistent in what is being reported between different entities.
The much more important information comes through identifying how much an entity can and expects to be involved in influencing changes to the emissions it reports today for future periods. If they can clearly break down the emissions they report into buckets of emissions based on what they can and cannot influence, and then explain how they plan to influence others to reduce in line with their targets, then the report data become much more powerful.
Instead of being just another metric to report, it becomes enriched with both information about the present and guidance about the future, which brings both value creation potential and accountability.
A step-change: how a systemic risk buffer could benefit transition finance
The financial consequences of climate change and the necessary transition to global Net Zero by 2050 have made it difficult for financial institutions to change the way they make decisions quickly enough. A working paper published by researchers at the European Central Bank provides evidence for how the financial sector could be insulated from any losses by creating a systemic risk for the entire sector.
Until now, most of the regulatory responses to the risks associated with climate change have been incentives for non-financial companies to make green investments, greater disclosure by corporations and financial institutions about their financed emissions, and climate stress-testing exercises by central banks and supervisors.
The Systemic Risk Buffer was developed to reflect the overall level of near-term transition risk exposure of the financial institution – within the coming three years — and not be linked to individual green or dirty assets. Instead of adjusting the risk weighting of individual exposures, as a green supporting factor or dirty penalizing factor would do, it groups financial institutions into buckets based on the potential transition risk relative to their risk-weighted assets.
Using the collected data for calibrating a systemic risk buffer provides a tangible use for the stress tests and a data-guided way to balance the risk of financing climate-exposed sectors with the short-term gain that banks have by continuing to provide financing. Transition risk buckets offers substantial leeway for banks to finance companies transitioning activities from unsustainable to sustainable activities without facing increases in their capital requirement.
Blue finance could make a meaningful contribution to the SDGs
Blue bonds could cover 10% of the funding needed for SDG14 – which is partly focused on protecting life in the oceans – by 2030, according to a report by SystemIQ. Blue finance has received far less attention than green finance, the broader category of finance of which it is often considered a subset, but has grown meaningfully since the first blue bond was issued in 2018 by the government of Seychelles.
Among the regions in focus in the report, MENAT is notable because it has not seen any issued blue bonds to date, although Egypt is expected to follow a previous green bond issuance with a debut blue bond. There are many promising types of blue finance that could be used across the MENAT region. This is a key part of the global shipping market, including within it the Suez Canal in Egypt and the Jebel Ali port in the UAE (one of the world’s dozen largest ports by volume).
There are challenges in linking together the co-benefits from investing sustainably in one sector of the blue economy with other investments in other ocean-related sectors, but a lot of opportunities as well. Seeing a focus placed on opportunities for blue bonds and other forms of blue finance across the MENAT region and Asia – which includes many OIC countries – should be a call to action to consider blue finance among other developing approaches to responsible finance by financial institutions within these markets.
The RFI Foundation is involved in coordinating an “Oceans Flagship Laboratory” announced during COP 28 which is a part of the BC100+ initiative focusing on blockchain and the SDGs. The Oceans Flagship Laboratory is working to explore the role of technology to increase flows of blue finance, particularly within the MENAT region. Contact us for more information.
Islamic finance is creating opportunities to provide leadership in responsible finance
The Islamic finance market has demonstrated impressive growth in recent decades, with several waves of growth propelled by different global trends. There has been increasing convergence with the development of responsible finance that has occurred over the decade since the agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate, which was a principal objective of the RFI Foundation when it was established in 2015.
One success of Islamic finance in adopting responsible finance has been demonstrating the operational compatibility of ESG screening alongside the core mandate for Shariah compliance. A new position paper from the Malaysian International Islamic Financial Centre (MIFC) Leadership Council provides a vision for the next phase of growth and development of Islamic finance. This is one of several initiatives to more firmly establish responsible finance in its core.
There has always been a strong ground for Islamic finance to play a more active and leading role in addressing global needs to address concerns such as the climate and nature crisis. What has taken time since agreement around global goals for sustainable development and restoring balance in planetary systems has been to demonstrate compatibility of climate and ESG approaches with Islamic finance. By conclusively demonstrating this compatibility, Islamic finance has also illuminated opportunities for the sector to lean into its concern for equity and justice and provide solutions as the momentum of interest in responsible finance produces opportunities to feasibly put them into action.