Major Wall Street banks have threatened to leave UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney’s alliance over legal risks, the Financial Times reported yesterday, citing several people involved in internal talks.
Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan & Chase Co, Bank of America Corp and Spanish bank Santander SA are among the banks that are weighing an exit as they fear being sued over the alliance’s stringent decarbonization commitments, the report said.
The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, set up last year by Carney, a former Bank of England governor, is a coalition of assets managers, banks and insurance firms representing US$130 trillion in assets directed toward tackling climate change.
Some alliance members have said that they “feel blindsided by tougher UN climate criteria and are worried about the legal risks of participation,” the report said.
The banks’ legal departments are particularly anxious about US Securities and Exchange Commission rules with regard to climate risk disclosures, the report said.
The commission would soon require formal disclosures in annual reports about governance, risk management and strategy with respect to climate change.
The bankers have also complained that the demands placed on them are not supported by enough government action on climate change and that there are fewer members in the UN alliance from the world’s top carbon-emitting countries such as China, Russia and India.
The alliance earlier said it planned to release a series of frameworks, white papers and other guidance to help its members reach their climate goals as it prepares for the next UN climate summit in Egypt in November.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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