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Let's be friendsAs part of the Ditch Dirty Development campaign, People & Planet, along with partner organisations PLATFORM and NUS, have been directly engaging with RBS-NatWest to raise key campaign issues. Details of this engagement including meetings and letters will be published here (most recent at the top of the page).
Meetings with RBS-NatWest
20 August 2008: Meeting between representatives of People & Planet, RBS Corporate Responsibility Team, PLATFORM and NUS.
What RBS-Natwest must do to Ditch Dirty Development:
RBS-NatWest must adopt and implements a policy to switch funding from fossil fuel projects to renewable energy. This policy must commit RBS-NatWest to:
Calculate and publish the embedded emissions resulting from loans to oil, gas and coal projects
Cap embedded emissions and set annual targets for reductions
Commit to an irreversible transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy lending
Establish ‘no-go’ areas for lending: immediately halt loans to unconventional fossil fuels (eg tar sands) and which affect sensitive ecosystems such as rainforests. Funding for new unabated coal power generation in the global North should also immediately be stopped.
This meeting was the first time People & Planet, PLATFORM and NUS were able to put the campaign demands (see box) directly to the Corporate Responsibility Team of the RBS Group.
Read a summary of key points here, download the full minutes, and then why not do some engagement of your own? Email RBS to let them know what you think of their response to the campaign so far.
Summary:
Overall, while the meeting was positive in terms of direct communication with RBS staff, there was no indication that the key demands of the Ditch Dirty Development campaign are being met by RBS. There was no agreement over the term ‘embedded emissions’, nor that RBS would monitor and report on these, and the discussion did not even get to the central campaign aim that RBS should commit to reducing these emissions.
In terms of a transition of investments to renewable energy, it is clear that RBS has made commitments to fund renewables, but without reducing funding for fossil fuels, this will not result in the transition needed to avoid dangerous climate change. In the meeting, there was no suggestion that RBS would reduce investments in fossil fuels, rather the opposite, as RBS made arguments to justify continued investments (eg the argument that we need to ‘keep the lights on’).
On no-go areas, such as tar sands and unabated coal power, there was no indication that RBS was intending to make public its internal guidance, nor that this guidance covered the areas outlined by the campaign as of particular concern for climate change.
Further Key points arising from the meeting:
RBS didn’t accept the term ‘embedded emissions’, nor did they make any commitments or indication of intending to reduce these.
RBS maintained that it is categorically not an option to report on individual projects’ carbon emissions in their corporate responsibility reporting.
RBS highlighted the fact that there is no agreed methodology for calculating embedded emissions, and identified some difficulties in terms of how to allocate responsibility for emissions. We pointed out that the lack of a standard methodology should not mean that no action is taken, rather that RBS should aim to lead in developing a robust methodology for the whole sector.
RBS said they are involved in debates in the sector on how the banking industry engages with the issue of climate change. We believe that such debates are a potential way to move the whole sector forward and urged RBS to take a leading role in pushing for sector-wide action to monitor, report on and reduce emissions resulting from lending.
RBS said they are a large bank and therefore have a significant energy financing portfolio. They pointed out that they are also a leading financier of renewable energy. The RBS Chairman announced the company’s aim to be number one in renewable energy financing at the low carbon summit that RBS held with Government in June 2008.
However, RBS also claimed that there are not enough renewable projects for them to fund, pointed out the challenge faced by the Government in terms of ‘keeping the lights on’ and argued that to achieve transition it was essential to invest in new technologies such as carbon capture.
Asked whether RBS would rule out certain projects on the basis of moral, social or environmental principles, RBS said it had internal policy guidance and risk assessment procedures, but could not tell us about these in detail.
RBS informed us of their new environment programme, which has four areas: i) the environmental footprint of RBS (meaning their direct, rather than embedded emissions); ii) employee engagement (eg encouraging employees to reduce their own carbon footprints); iii) product and service innovation (eg ‘green mortgages’); iv) environmental risk (this area includes financing and reputational risks).
RBS says it cannot get ahead of Government policy or investor sentiment in terms of action on climate change.
Download the full minutes of the meeting. These minutes have been agreed by everyone who was at the meeting.
The Corporate Responsibility Team at RBS have said that they are happy to receive and respond to emails on these issues. Tell them what you think of the bank’s progress so far using this email box.
This action is no longer active.
When the action was active, this was our suggested text.
RBS and climate change
Please write your own message to the RBS Corporate Responsibility Team here. Referring to the minutes of the meeting might be a good idea, as these minutes are an agreed record of what was said.
Letters to RBS-NatWest
18 December 2007
Letter from People & Planet and PLATFORM to Sir Tom McKillop, Chairman of RBS Group
13 December 2007
Letter from NUS to Sir Tom McKillop, Chairman of RBS Group
