One of Australia’s big four banks has pledged to its shareholders that it won’t bank with large customers who have no climate transition plan.
Without providing detail to its pledge, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) Chairman, Paul O’Malley, told shareholders that the bank was taking its climate commitments seriously.
“As Australia’s largest bank, we have an important role to play in supporting Australia’s transition to a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
“Large customers that choose not to have a transition plan (on climate change) by 2025, we will not be able to bank them.”
This follows the release of the bank’s first climate report in August, in which it outlined its climate strategy.
One of the ways the bank intends to achieve its net-zero target is by helping customers “make their own changes”—with products tailored to encourage people to make more energy-efficient choices, such as buying solar panels.
“We have aligned our temperature ambition to 1.5 degrees and joined the Net-Zero Banking Alliance,” O’Malley said.
Rising Interest Rates
While the bank’s response on climate change dominated the meeting—with around a dozen climate activists rallying outside the meeting as well as some briefly disrupting the meeting—O’Malley said that both climate change and rising interest rates were issues Australia had not seen in years.This comes off the back of fears of a global recession as markets face rising interest rates, high inflation, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the energy crisis in Europe.
