Bankers, investors plan return to COP climate conference
investmentnews.comThe world’s top bankers and investors mostly stayed away from last year’s United Nations climate conference in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh. But holding December’s COP28 meeting in Dubai, one of the world’s major financial centers, pretty much guarantees they’ll make a much bigger showing.
Banks including Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc. and Standard Chartered Plc are preparing to send larger delegations this year, in part because they have offices in Dubai. Bill Winters, who runs Standard Chartered, will attend after skipping the Egypt gathering.
Barclays Chief Executive Officer C.S. Venkatakrishnan is planning to be at COP28 after staying away in 2022. His team will host client events on increasing the flow of money to climate technologies and developing carbon-saving projects.
“How to scale the deployment of renewables in emerging economies, which are the fastest-growing sources of emissions, will be a central question,” says Daniel Hanna, Barclays’ global head of sustainable finance for its corporate and investment bank.
The UK bank expects that talk about climate finance will find a receptive audience in the Middle East, where sustainable finance activity has been increasing. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund raised $5.5 billion from a green bond sale in February, which Barclays wasn’t involved in. Hanna says the bank also is exploring a number of potential debt-for-nature swap transactions, financial instruments that give countries access to debt relief in exchange for promises to protect their environments.
The return of bankers will create a big opportunity to talk up their efforts to help finance a quicker transition to green energy, one of the host nation’s key objectives, and earn some goodwill
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