Dutch bank ING said this week that it will drop large clients it believes are not making sufficient progress on reducing their climate impact.The announcement comes just days before leaders convene for Climate Week NYC 2024 September 22-29 to showcase leading climate action and discuss how to do more.
The annual event is hosted by the Climate Group and New York City and takes place in conjunction with the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and The World Economic Forum’s annual Sustainable Development Impact Meetings which bring together more than 1,000 business leaders, policymakers, international and civil society organizations, innovators and social entrepreneurs to advance the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).
The 2030 deadline for the UN SDGs is approaching, but less than a fifth of the SDG targets are on track. While there has been minimal or moderate progress on nearly half of the targets, more than a third have stalled or even regressed, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024 found in June.
ING Chief executive Steven van Rijswijk said September 17 that the Dutch bank had put its clients on notice that it would either restrict or stop providing finance to companies that fail to address their carbon footprint on a case-by-case basis. Although some banks have introduced restrictions on lending to specific sectors such as coal, policies that apply across large chunks of their portfolio are rare.
ING’s stance is in sharp contrast to many other financial institutions, especially in the U.S., notes the Financial Times. Banks such as Bank of America have loosened some climate targets or become reluctant to speak out about the financial risks of global warming amid a backlash against so-called “woke capitalism.”
ING’s Van Rijswijk told the Financial Times that ING had assessed 2,000 of its largest clients based on their publicly available climate transition plans and other data. Companies had until 2026 to make sufficient progress, he said. “Our goal is to make sure we fight climate change. It is not to say goodbye to clients,” he said. “But if it is about them not being willing [to address their carbon footprint] then that will mean we will say goodbye.” He added that bank wanted to move “in tandem with Paris”, the global agreement to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C and ideally to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. “.\
Now, more than ever, businesses need to recognize that “the imperative for action on environmental issues is one not of morality or consumer sentiment but the laws of nature,” says an essay by Linsay Hooper, interim CEO of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CSIL) and CISL fellow Paul Gilding, which was published this week in The Financial Times. “Climate change and biodiversity loss are not abstract threats but real and measurable factors that will undermine business as usual,” says the essay. “Rather than asking ‘How much sustainability can we afford?’ companies must ask ‘How do we accelerate, navigate and benefit from the transition’?”
Some companies are getting it right: Swedish steel, mining and utility businesses have formed the Hybrit initiative to reinvent their industry with solutions such as fossil-free steel, notes the guest essay. But others, such as the plastics industry, are acting defensively and cling to inadequate measures, says the essay, when they should be building the critical mass needed to advocate for policies and action to drive waste collection, cut material use and increase reuse and recycling.
The essay lays out a case for why companies ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) polices are not working.
“The environmental, social and governance agenda has not delivered and in its current form and it never will,” says the essay. A change of mindset and a fundamental redesign of the markets that frame business decisions is needed to eliminate the tension between profitability and sustainability, it says. It calls for the creation of thriving markets for climate-neutral, nature-positive and circular products and for governments to create conditions that make it economically compelling to phase out damaging activities. Otherwise, the essay says, “businesses that voluntarily transition will be undermined by those that don’t.”
IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK:
HEALTH
Elon Musk’s Neuralink Obtains “Breakthrough Device” FDA Approval
Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink said on September 17 its experimental implant aimed at restoring vision received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s “breakthrough device” designation. Founded in 2016 by Musk and a group of engineers, Neuralink is building a brain chip interface that can be implanted within the skull, which it says could eventually help disabled patients to move and communicate again and also restore vision. The FDA’s breakthrough tag is given to certain medical devices that provide treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening conditions. It is aimed at speeding up development and review of devices currently under development. The experimental device, known as Blindsight, “will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see,” Musk said in a post on X.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
U.S. To Convene Global AI Safety Summit In November
The Biden administration plans to convene a global safety summit on artificial intelligence, it said on September 18, as Congress continues to struggle with regulating the technology. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will host on Nov. 20-21 the first meeting of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes in San Francisco to “advance global cooperation toward the safe, secure, and trustworthy development of artificial intelligence.” Raimondo in May announced the launch of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes during the AI Seoul Summit in May, where nations agreed to prioritize AI safety, innovation and inclusivity. The goal of the San Francisco meeting is to jumpstart technical collaboration before the AI Action Summit in Paris in February.
AI Experts Ready Humanity’s “Last Exam”
A team of technology experts issued a global call on September 16 seeking the toughest questions to pose to artificial intelligence systems, which increasingly have aced popular benchmark tests. Dubbed “Humanity’s Last Exam” the project seeks to determine when expert-level AI has arrived. It aims to stay relevant even as capabilities advance in future years, according to the organizers, a non-profit called the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and the startup Scale AI. The call comes days after the maker of ChatGPT previewed a new model, known as OpenAI o1, which “destroyed the most popular reasoning benchmarks,” Dan Hendrycks, executive director of CAIS and an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI startup, told Reuters.
Lionsgate Studio Signs Deal With AI Startup Runway
The entertainment company behind “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” plans to start using generative artificial intelligence in the creation of its new movies and TV shows, a sign of the emerging technology’s advance in Hollywood, reports the Wall Street Journal. Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to give Runway, one of several fast-evolving AI startups, access to its content library in exchange for a new, custom AI model that the studio can use in the editing and production process.
UN Advisory Board Makes Seven Recommendations For Governing AI
An artificial-intelligence advisory body at the United Nations on September 19 released its final report proposing seven recommendations to address AI-related risks and gaps in governance. The U.N. last year created a 39-member advisory body to address issues in the international governance of AI. The recommendations will be discussed during a U.N. summit held in September. With the development of AI in the hands of a few multinational companies, there is a danger that the technology could be imposed on people without them having a say in how it is used, the U.N. said in a statement. It recommended a new policy dialogue on AI governance, creating an AI standards exchange and a global AI capacity development network to boost governance capacities. Among other proposals, the U.N. wants a global AI fund to be established, which would address gaps in capacity and collaboration. It also advocates the formation of a global AI data framework to ensure transparency and accountability.Finally, the U.N. report proposed setting up a small AI office to support and coordinate the implementation of these proposals.
T-Mobile Strikes Deal With Open AI
T-Mobile said it would partner with OpenAI to build an artificial-intelligence platform designed to help the telecom company gain and keep customers, reports The Wall Street Journal. The companies said the new platform, called IntentCX, will harvest data on customer interactions from the millions of T-Mobile subscribers who use its T-Life app. The app, launched this year, combines several existing services like bill management, smartwatch integration and T-Mobile Tuesdays retail deals through a single portal.T-Mobile said the partnership will help the company automate tasks that might ordinarily demand a store visit or a call to a customer-service agent. The new platform would blend data on past service calls with network status information to troubleshoot their problems, for instance.
AGRICULTURE
Startup Partners With Corteva On Gene Editing Of Crops
Pairwise, a startup pioneering gene editing in plants, has closed a $40m series C funding round and formed a five-year joint venture collaboration with agtech giant Corteva to advance the tech to increase climate resilience in corn and soy..
CYBERSECURITY
Hacker Uses Chatbot on Telegram To Leak Details Of Indian Insurance Company’s Clients
Stolen customer data including medical reports from India’s biggest health insurer, Star Health, is publicly accessible via chatbots on Telegram, just weeks after Telegram’s founder was accused of allowing the messenger app to facilitate crime. The purported creator of the chatbots told a security researcher, who alerted Reuters to the issue, that private details of millions of people were for sale and that samples could be viewed by asking the chatbots to divulge them. Using the chatbots, Reuters was able to download policy and claims documents featuring names, phone numbers, addresses, tax details, copies of ID cards, test results and medical diagnoses.
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