Green banking for businesses

• We plan to stop lending to and underwriting companies with more than 15% of activities related to coal, unless they have a credible transition plan in line with 2015 Paris Agreement* by the end of 2021
• We plan to stop lending to and underwriting major oil and gas producers unless they have a credible transition plan in line with the 2015 *Paris Agreement by the end of 2021

*The Paris Agreement is the first-ever universal, legally binding global climate change agreement, adopted at the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015.

• We have market leading policies on reducing the most harmful activities, including prohibitions on project financing for coal power plants, thermal coal mines, oil sand or arctic oil projects. In February 2020, we announced further changes to our policy to prohibit project financing for fracking or oil and gas exploration.

• We plan to provide an additional £20bn funding and financing for climate and sustainable finance between 2020 and 2022
• We reserve at least 25% of places in our Entrepreneur accelerator hubs for businesses supporting environmental activities

• We were a leading lender to the UK renewables sector by number of transactions in the past decade (2009-2019)
• We provided £9.9bn to sustainable energy funding and financing to the sustainable energy sector between 2018 and 2019

We plan to support our UK and Republic of Ireland mortgage customers to increase their residential energy efficiency and buy the most energy efficient homes. Our aim is to have 50% of the mortgages we provide at or above Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating C or equivalent by 2030. 

We plan to help customers track their carbon impact with innovative products and services, delivered through cross-industry collaboration. We've just launched a partnership with a start-up called CoGo to test their carbon footprint tracking tool. We’ll be expanding the pilot to business customers in the 2021, and work toward designing a solution for all customers.

We're setting ourselves the challenge to at least halve the climate impact of our financing activity by 2030, and intend to do what is necessary to achieve alignment with the 2015 Paris Agreement. To do this, we plan to quantify our total climate impact, including the impact of all our customers, and set sector-specific targets by 2022.

• We’re working to make our operations climate positive by 2025
• We have reduced emissions from our own operations by 61% since 2014

• We are a founding signatory of the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative’s Principles for Responsible Banking. This commits us to further aligning our strategy to the 2015 Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.*

*The Paris Agreement is the first-ever universal, legally binding global climate change agreement, adopted at the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015

We’ve set a bold ambition to be a leading bank in addressing the climate challenge.

Visit the NatWest Group Climate page