This page provides highlights of our benchmarking of the climate-related disclosures included in the 2021 annual reports of 35 major, global banks.
Climate-related risks and their business impacts are the focus of attention for annual report readers like never before. However, if we look at the annual reports of global banks their progress in disclosing climate-related matters in annual reports has slowed down in 2021.
Heightened regulation generally results in enhanced disclosures in the annual reports. Although all the banks provide disclosures of climate-related matters in their 2021 annual reports, the nature and extent of information disclosed varies significantly across the banks in our analysis and appears to be driven by whether there is regulation (or regulatory guidance) in a country or region.
Consistent with our benchmarking last year, all of the banks provide their climate-related disclosures mainly in the front part of their 2021 annual reports.
A small number of banks mention climate in the notes to the financial statements.
- All the banks that mention climate in the financial statements are from the UK, Australia or Europe.
- The nature and extent of information disclosed in the financial statements by these banks is often minimal – e.g. disclosing in a single statement that climate-related impacts have been considered in the cash flow projections used for goodwill impairment assessments.
Find out more - Read our analysis
Read our benchmarking analysis on how banks reported on climate-related matters in the 2021 reporting season. The reports include the scope and approach of our analysis. See phase 1 on how we have assessed the disclosures as ‘more detailed’, ‘less detailed’ or ‘no disclosures’ provided and phase 2 for maturity scale we used to assess banks’ climate-related disclosures.
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