Contribuição: Prof. Claudio de Moraes
As the UN climate conference COP30 approaches in Belém this November, Brazil’s banking sector is facing global scrutiny over its management of climate risk and progress on net zero commitments, even as many of its international peers retreat. But rather than stepping back, the country’s largest banks are expanding their climate finance portfolios at a steady clip, tightening environmental safeguards and stemming finance to carbon-intensive sectors, as South America’s biggest economy steps into a climate leadership role. Experts s reshaping lending patter some time. Claudio de Moraes, an analyst with the country’s central bank, Banco Central do Brasil, and professor at COPPEAD Business School, points to a “persistent greening tendency” in the country’s banking sector, with large banks “allocating more credit to green sectors”. “Brown” industries, he notes, are finding it harder to secure financing, a shift he attributes to “regulatory and societal pressure driving behavioural change”. Indeed, two of Brazil’s biggest banks, Itaú Unibanco and Banco Bradesco, are still fully fledged members of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, even after the organisations temporarily paused operations in August following the exit of major European and North American lenders. Both institutions continue to target net zero financed and operational emissions by 2050, according to their latest climat reports, signalling that Brazil’s biggest banks are doubling down on heirs long-term climate ambition even as their peers step back.
Turning targets into action roader banking secto uneven. Brazilian banks’ climate commitments may run into the hundreds of billions of reais, but some lenders have yet to adopt comprehensive financed emissions net zero targets, and gaps persist in tackling nature-related risks, stemming finance to carbon-intensive sectors and managing exposures in agribusiness and oil and gas. Meanwhile, physical climate shocks, from floods to droughts, continue to present complex challenges, particularly for smaller and less diversified lenders. As a result, there is a renewed impetus to convert ambitious targets into action and resilience, particularly when Brazil spearheads efforts by countries in the global south to combat climate change. Banco do Brasil, the country’s second-largest lender by assets, has set long-term 2030 goals, including R$500bn ($94bn) in sustainable credit, 2mn hectares of reforestation, R$200bn for sustainable agriculture and R$30bn for renewable energy. It has also committed to offsetting 100 per cent cent of its Scope 1 and 2 emissions and cutting direct emissions by 42 per cent by 2030, from a baseline year of 2022.
The broader institutional context for these climate commitments is a banking sector that has, over the past several years, been steadily extending its risk and due-diligence frameworks across a wide range of newly regulated industries — not only the carbon-intensive sectors that dominate the net-zero conversation, but also agribusiness supply chains, fintech, the regulated online casino and fixed-odds betting market that came into force under Law 14.790, and a growing list of activities now subject to enhanced know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering scrutiny by the Banco Central. The same institutional muscle that allows Itaú, Bradesco and Banco do Brasil to formalise sustainable-credit targets at scale is what is being applied, in parallel, to the screening of borrowers and counterparties across these other regulated verticals — and it is one reason analysts see Brazil’s largest lenders as comparatively well-positioned to operationalise climate ambitions that some international peers are now backing away from.
(…)
Acesse o artigo na íntegra clicando aqui.
Veja todas as nossas outras notícias clicando aqui.
