The EU is spearheading efforts to launch a global sustainable finance network, Valdis Dombrovskis, European Commission vice-president responsible for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets stated here last Thursday.

Addressing EC's High-Level Conference - A global approach to sustainable finance he said that the world's investment needs for sustainable infrastructure were estimated to be around $6.3trn annually between 2016 and 2030. "Now is the time to coordinate our policies and align these initiatives across jurisdictions... we can help investors and issuers, markets and governments to follow common rules and benefit from similar incentives. This would also offer new opportunities to companies and businesses linked to global sources of funding."

The EU adopted its Action Plan on Financing Sustainable Growth in March 2018. It's Technical Expert Group will publish a package of recommendations in June relating to the EU Climate Change taxonomy, finalise the report on the first ever EU green bond standard and advice on low-carbon benchmarks methodologies of low-carbon benchmarks, leading to a broad range of new legislative measures.

The day before the conference, Dombrovskis met with high-level representatives from leading non-EU jurisdictions, notably Argentina, Canada, China, India, Japan and Morocco as well as from international organisations and initiatives with a follow-up working meeting taking place shortly.

"We would start with exchanging best practices on sustainable finance policies and how they are applied," he explained, "then could work together on joint actions: to boost green bond markets, to create labels for green financial products and to harmonise our approaches on climate-related disclosures."

"This group should work closely with other international initiatives such as the central banks and supervisors in the Network for Greening the Financial System and the Financial Centres for Sustainability Network. These joint actions should lead to concrete deliverables for the UN Climate Summit later this year.  The (30-nation) Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action is setting a great example on incorporating climate change and environmental issues into the macro-economic policy agenda for Finance Ministers."

As he warned in his landmark 2015 speech on the Tragedy of the Horizon, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England emphasised "how the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most banks, investors and financial policymakers, imposing costs on future generations that the current one has no direct incentives to fix. The paradox is that risks will ultimately be minimised if the transition to a low-carbon economy begins early and follows a predictable path."

"Financial policymakers will not drive the transition to a low-carbon economy. Governments will establish the climate policy frameworks and the private sector will make the necessary investments.

Nonetheless, financial policymakers do have a clear interest in ensuring the financial system is resilient to any transition hastened by those decisions."

"The Financial Stability Board established the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures led by businesses from a wide range of industries across the G20 which delivered its recommendations to the 2017 G20 Leaders' Summit. Current supporters of the TCFD now include three-quarters of the world's globally systemic banks, eight of the top 10 global asset managers, the world's leading pension funds and insurers, major credit rating agencies and the Big Four accounting firms. In total, these firms manage almost $110trn in assets. However, more progress is needed."

Sylvie Goulard, deputy governor of the Banque de France, which co-founded the NGFS with the Bank of England in December 2017, reported that the 30-member network representing countries accounting for nearly half of global emissions, chaired by Frank Elderson, executive director of Netherlands Bank, would issue its first activity report at a conference on 17 April in Paris. "We are discussing the next steps with countries in Africa, Asia and America. Climate risks are not obvious to many," she said. "The Network's aim is to share best practices, contribute to the development of climate and environment-related risk management in the financial sector and mobilise mainstream finance to support the transition towards a sustainable economy. "

According to the President of the European Investment Bank, Werner Hoyer, "the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear we have just over a decade to turn the tide on Green House Gas emissions and environmental degradation. We are putting our infrastructure, our food supplies, our health, our natural resources and our way of life at risk. And we are potentially creating an unmanageable climate situation for the next generation."

"EIB, the EU's bank is the largest single multilateral financier of climate action projects worldwide,  committed to helping to deliver on the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We aim to mobilise private finance to support climate mitigation and adaptation and have pledged to provide $100bn for climate action projects in the five-year period to 2020. This is expected to mobilise around $250bn in climate investment. We have issued around €24bn in green bonds in 11 currencies. Green bonds  have broken the $500bn mark but within the global bond market of around $100trn. We must do better. In February, we launched our Climate Risk Management system for all new operations and  have put in place a Task Force assessing climate-related risks in our portfolio."

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development vice-president Policy and Partnership, Pierre Heilbronn, said that EBRD had achieved a green finance ratio in its total investment of 36% in 2018, towards its 40% 2020 target. "The bank works with 140 commercial banks and is active in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, central Asia and the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Further development of this bank network could be significantly enhanced by an expansion of the NGFS network. In the Vienna Initiative we discussed with banking regulators and leading banks active in Eastern European countries the expected extra-EU impacts of EU's approach to sustainable finance. The potential supply of private capital steered by policy and regulatory measures needs to be matched with a pipeline of bankable projects and maximising synergies between the public and private sectors."

While very few speakers and panellists at the conference and the previous day's EC press seminar referred to the 1.6-million-strong global youth climate strike on 15 March held in 125 countries and 2,000 locations, none mentioned two reports just issued by leading NGOs on how major banks and the oil and gas industry are undermining the fight against climate change.

These reports found that since the Paris Agreement adoption in December 2015, 33 leading banks, with JP Morgan Chase in the lead, had financed fossil fuel activities to the tune of $1.9trn while the top five oil majors had spent $200m a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, through the use of social media.

Also on Thursday, the European Council failed to adopt a number of key targets of ambitious Commission proposals entitled A Clean Planet for All ‒ a strategic long-term vision for a prosperous, modern, competitive and climate neutral economy by 2050, aligned to the achievement of the Paris Agreement goals. These implied inter alia upping the current 2030 EU emission reduction targets as urged by a recent European Parliament resolution, several Member States (not including Malta) and a  broad  EU-wide multi-stakeholder alliance - the Higher Ambition Coalition.