French financial companies, which regularly update their policies to combat global warming, display objectives that are “poorly quantifiable, poorly monitored and poorly comparable,” deplores the Court of Auditors in its annual report published on Tuesday.
Specific to each company, the indicators for monitoring commitments made by banking institutions and insurers, as well as their methodologies, are often poorly explained, the Court also considers.
The main French bankers and insurers have committed to aligning their portfolio with the objectives of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5C compared to the pre-industrial era.
Lots of communication, but blind spots
The participation of these organizations in Net zero alliances, with the horizon of carbon neutrality by 2050, does not involve an obligation of result, recalls the Court. For her, the ambition displayed by these actors as the important communication made around includes blind spots.
Financial companies communicate in value or variation sometimes on overall volumes allocated to the transition (BNP Paribas, Crdit Agricole), sometimes on objectives for allocating a part of their result to green projects (Crdit Mutuel, Maif) or even on outstanding loans (BPCE) or green investments (Axa, CNP Assurances) to achieve. Others target a particular sector (the energy transition for Societe Generale), details the report.
The Court also criticizes the use of terms with definitions that it presents as changing: green loans, projects with a high climate impact, unconventional hydrocarbons, etc.
She also notes that the need for profitability remains a priority for investors and financiers, far ahead of the environmental impact, and rejects outright the discourse on the supposed lack of projects, often put forward by the managers of these establishments. The hypothesis of a lack of green projects, an argument frequently mentioned to justify the limited results of financing the transition, appears unfounded. The issue lies rather in the limited number of sufficiently profitable green projects, writes the Court.
Finally, it addresses a bad point about the Institute of Sustainable Finance (IFD), an organization dedicated to the fight against global warming within the lobby of the French financial center, Paris Europlace, accused of not taking adaptation issues into account. to climate change.
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