CTBC Financial Holding Co (中信金控) has signed on to the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), becoming Taiwan’s first financial institution to join the industry-led initiative.
The Oct. 8 move, which requires the disclosure of portfolio companies’ greenhouse gas emissions, was a natural next step for CTBC Financial, which has been adopting new inventory measures in the past few years to assess the carbon emissions of its financial products, as well as help its customers with low-carbon transformation.
“Urgent solutions are required to address the risks brought by climate change,” CTBC Financial president Daniel Wu (吳一揆) said in a news release on Monday.
Photo: Lee Chin-hui, Taipei Times
The PCAF is important given that emission calculations serve as the foundation on which enterprises set emission reduction goals, he said.
The financial industry differs from carbon-intensive industries, such as the petrochemical and semiconductor industries, in that its emissions come primarily from portfolio companies, Wu added.
To this end, the PCAF was launched in Europe in 2015 and globally last year, assisting financial institutions in measuring and disclosing the greenhouse gas emissions generated by financial products such as loans and investments.
Its methodology measures the greenhouse gas emissions of portfolio companies or individual investment assets, covering collateral, real-estate loans, power generation project financing, and company equity or debt.
By signing on to the PCAF, CTBC Financial has committed to measuring and disclosing the greenhouse gas emissions of its portfolio companies within three years, while learning and sharing reliable carbon accounting methods and experience.
The Science Based Targets initiative has officially endorsed the PCAF’s methodology as a universal method for calculating and disclosing financial products’ greenhouse gas emissions.
With the addition of CTBC Financial, a total of 80 financial institutions worldwide have joined the PCAF.
The Taiwanese company’s participation in the PCAF is the latest in a series of moves bolstering the sustainability of its operations, guided by the spirit of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.
In the past two years, CTBC Financial and its subsidiaries have voluntarily joined a raft of international sustainability initiatives.
In April, CTBC Financial signed on to the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, while last year, subsidiary CTBC Bank (中國信託銀行), joined the Equator Principles and announced that it would comply with the UN Principles for Responsible Banking.
In addition, subsidiary Taiwan Life Insurance Co (台灣人壽保險) last year adopted the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI).
The insurer in July published the Taiwanese industry’s first PRI report with external assurance. It plans to release its first PSI report by the end of this year.
The pressing need for financial institutions to take greater action against climate change was highlighted earlier this year by the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2020, in which the top five global risks in terms of likelihood were all environmental — for the first time in the report’s 15-year history.
CTBC Financial said that by signing on to the PCAF and maintaining effective inventory of its products’ greenhouse gas emissions, it hopes to expand and use its influence for good.
Alongside these efforts focused on sustainability, the company has prioritized assisting clients with low-carbon transformation, rapidly responding to stakeholder concerns and fulfilling its social responsibilities.
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