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ARTICLE · 08 JUNE 2020

How Is Climate Change Impacting On The Financial Services Sector?

Gowling WLG
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Climate change and sustainability has featured highly on business agendas for some time now and increasingly so as a result of government commitments, new initiatives and pressure from various stakeholders.

United KingdomEnvironment
Sushil Kuner
Sushil Kuner
Ian Mason
Ian Mason
Ben Stansfield
Ben Stansfield
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Climate change and sustainability has featured highly on business agendas for some time now and increasingly so as a result of government commitments, new initiatives and pressure from various stakeholders. In the financial services sector, the issue presents various risks to a number of different participants and we expect that firms can only expect regulatory attention to increase over time.

Momentum has gradually built over time, with the 2015 United Nations climate-change summit in Paris (COP21) seeing the first-ever agreement under which virtually every country, including the UK, pledged to constrain their greenhouse gas emissions, with the aim of keeping global warming well below two degrees Celsius. In 2018, the UK Government issued its 25 Year Environment Plan and laid down legislation to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It followed this up with its Green Finance Strategy in July 2019, which recognised the crucial role of the financial services

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