This page provides highlights of our benchmarking of the climate-related disclosures included in the 2021 annual reports of 35 major, global banks.
Credit risk management is the section in the annual reports where we see the most qualitative and quantitative disclosures, with some of the banks disclosing details of exposures to carbon-intensive sectors such as oil and gas, or agriculture.
Climate-related risks may impact the expected cash flows to be received from a loan and, therefore, the banks’ exposure to credit losses. A majority of banks disclose details about the climate-related impacts on credit risk (qualitative and/or quantitative details). However, when we compare these disclosures between the banks in our analysis, 26 per cent of banks provide more detailed disclosures than others.
Many of the banks acknowledge the credit risk impacts in their disclosures in the annual report and they outline measures they have already taken to consider climate-related risks in their credit risk policies and processes. The banks with the more detailed disclosures provide quantitative details to the users of the annual reports – such as their lending exposures in climate-intensive sectors (an area in which we observe the detail currently sits mainly in the unaudited front part of the annual reports).
One common area where we don’t (yet) see detailed disclosures across all the banks is ECL (expected credit loss) measurement – or at least not in the financial statements along with the other ECL disclosures.
Find out more - Read our analysis
Read our benchmarking analysis on how banks reported on climate-related matters in the 2021 reporting season. The reports include the scope and approach of our analysis. See phase 1 on how we have assessed the disclosures as ‘more detailed’, ‘less detailed’ or ‘no disclosures’ provided and phase 2 for maturity scale we used to assess banks’ climate-related disclosures.
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