The UK’s biggest banks provided
Of the top five banks exposed to the sector, Barclays provided by far the most financing to firms on the Global Coal Exit list, with
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Barclays and
The report comes the day before Barclays is due to face a second consecutive shareholder resolution concerning its position as Europe’s largest fossil fuel financier at its AGM.
According to the data, which was compiled by NGOs Reclaim Finance and Urgewald, the
That’s despite the UK’s role as the co-chair of the global Powering Past Coal alliance, a group dedicated to phasing out power plants run on the fossil fuel.
“If the
The new figures come as the
Last month it announced that it would now cut emissions by 78 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035, in line with the recommendations of the
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It has also stopped providing financing to global coal projects, a move that a number of other countries have recently mimicked.
In response to the report, Barclays said in a statement: “The majority of the period covered in this research took place before we set our net zero ambition and before we started work to align our financing portfolio to the goals of the Paris Agreement in
“Our
“Last year, in recognition of the fact that Barclays should go further in this area, we have also committed to not provide general corporate financing that is specified as being for new or expanded coal mining or coal-fired power plant development, and have introduced tightened restrictions on financing of thermal coal mining and power clients.
“In particular, we set a limit on the amount of revenue which any client may derive from thermal coal mining and/or power, progressively decreasing from 50 per cent now to 30 per cent by 2025, to 10 per cent by 2030.
An HSBC Spokesperson said: ‘Our policies prohibit the financing of new thermal coal mines and new customers dependent on thermal coal mining, and we have not provided project finance for new coal-fired power plants since early 2018.
“We will publish by end 2021 a plan to phase out the financing of all coal-fired power and thermal coal mining by 2030 in markets in the
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“We are committed to detailed transparency on our transition strategy and plan to put it to a shareholder advisory vote in 2022.”
The global coal list is a database of companies with significant coal-related earnings.
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