A report looking into Europe’s top 25 banks from ShareAction identified some improvements in their climate and biodiversity strategies since the previous survey in 2020.
But they still have “a long way to go” to meet internationally agreed standards to deal with climate change, cut emissions and safeguard nature, the report found.
All 25 banks have said their businesses will be net-zero by 2050, but ShareAction said that a lack of transparency is leading to an underreporting of their support for high-carbon sectors.
While most banks now have at least one decarbonisation target in place, these often fail to capture the bulk of their financing to high-carbon sectors and do not always lead to absolute reductions of emissions, the report says.
Fossil fuel policies are often full of loopholes that make them unfit for alignment with efforts to keep temperature rises to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era.
For example, despite over three-quarters of banks now...