Institutional investors, backed by Europe's largest asset manager Amundi SA, have filed the first climate-related shareholder resolution against a European bank, Barclays PLC, signalling that investors are less prepared to tolerate long-term climate risks to their portfolios posed by banks lending to coal, oil and gas companies.
A group of institutional investors managing a total of £130 billion in assets is calling on U.K.-based Barclays to phase out its financing of fossil fuel firms that are not aligned with the Paris Agreement on climate change, which aims to limit the rise of global temperatures to "well below" 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. The proposal received a boost Feb. 13 when Amundi said it would support the proposal.
Barclays is the world's sixth-largest financier of fossil fuels, and Europe's largest, according to BankTrack, a watchdog group that monitors lenders' exposure to fossil fuels. Read Full Article - S&P Global, February 24, 2020