Our work

CEF consulted with the NSW Treasury, the NSW Office of Energy and Climate Change and the Sustainable Finance Unit of the Commonwealth Treasury to provide input into their decision on whether a nationally consistent approach to transition planning is needed, what guidance would assist businesses and how efforts can best be coordinated. Read more

In an Australian first, the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) – Australia’s biggest mortgage lender with over 25% of the market – has established a 60% emissions intensity reduction target on its mortgage book by 2030. This is a good start aided strongly by efforts to decarbonise the power grid, but also through policy advocacy and a future focus on customer engagement which we look forward to more details on. Read more

CEF Special Advisor Paul Oosting looks at Australia’s opportunity to reform superannuation benchmarks to support investment in energy transition in light of last week’s release of the Intergenerational Report by Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Read more

CBA released a landmark fossil fuel financing policy that rules out project finance for new (greenfield) oil and gas (O&G) extraction and for expansions of existing (brownfield) O&G extraction. CBA will also require fossil fuel clients to commit to verifiable transition plans by 2025 encompassing Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and aligned to a Paris Agreement “well below 2 degrees” pathway. Read more

Global climate financing momentum is accelerating towards a decarbonised economy. Australia has a once in a lifetime opportunity to invest to generate affordable clean energy (SDG 7) create economic strength (SDG 8), responsible production (SDG 12) and act to mitigate climate change this decade (SDG 13). Read more

Last week, BNP Paribas (BNPP) released its oil and gas financing policy committing the bank to excluding the financing of new oil and gas fields, and making it the second largest bank in the world, after HSBC, to make such a commitment. This builds on BNPP’s target of January 2023 that by 2030, low-carbon energies would account for 4/5 of the Group’s financing for energy production. Read more

Fifth in CEF’s climate finance analyses series of Australia’s Big 5 banks, Nishtha Aggarwal reviews the entirety of Macquarie Group’s climate impact across the Group’s four business lines, Macquarie Asset Management (MAM), Macquarie Capital (MacCap), Banking and Financial Services (BFS), and Commodities and Global Markets (CGM). We find The Group’s combined global 107GW portfolio of clean energy is unrivalled among major Australian financial institutions, but its dominance in conventional energy markets undermines the Group’s climate commitments by contributing to global warming above a 1.5 degree pathway. Read more

In the fourth in CEF’s series of climate finance analyses of Australia’s Big 5 banks, Nishtha Aggarwal reviews CommBank’s FY2022 full year financial disclosures across four climate themes. CBA is the largest Australian bank by market and plays a role in more than 40% of all domestic financial transactions. We find CBA is getting the trend right, setting a benchmark in sustainable finance transparency and success in oil and gas portfolio decarbonisation, but can still do more to pivot balance sheet financing of Australian climate solutions. Read more

Our wrap of the top ten energy events in 2022, including the end of federal climate and energy policy chaos under the LNP, and our wishlist for an even better 2023! Read more

In the third instalment in our series of climate finance analyses of Australia’s Big 5 banks, CEF’s Nishtha Aggarwal reviews Westpac’s FY2022 full year financial disclosures across 4 key themes. We find that while Westpac is making progress, e.g., mitigating greenwash through lending classifications that improve disclosure on sustainable finance, and decreasing coal, oil and gas lending, there is significant room to improve ambition across all 4 themes. Read more

A special update of CEF’s November 3 ANZ Climate Finance Assessment. In the same week that the CSIRO announced Australia has reached 1.47°C warming – 0.03 degrees shy of the Paris threshold – we were pleased to see ANZ renew its climate change commitment, boasting a massive uplift in decarbonisation finance with a $100bn pledge over 8 years, from FY2023 to FY2030. We track this positive move, and areas where there is still an urgent need for further ambition. Read more

Our latest update including the historic victory for decarbonisation at the AGL AGM, our deep dive into BlueScope’s plan to sink $1bn into carbon intensive blast furnace tech, and our most recent analyses of big banks’ climate efforts – this time focussing on NAB – and of the critical minerals industry, looking at Australian companies expanding offshore. Read more