The world’s top bankers and investors mostly stayed away from last year’s United Nations climate conference in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh.
Banks including Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc. and Standard Chartered Plc, will have their delegations this year in the Gulf nation.
Bill Winters, who runs Standard Chartered, will attend after skipping the Egypt gathering.
According to Bloomberg report, Barclays Chief Executive Officer C.S. Venkatakrishnan who stayed away in 2022, will have his team host client events on increasing the flow of money to climate technologies and developing carbon-saving projects.
“How to scale the deployment of renewables in emerging economies, which are the fastest-growing sources of emissions, will be a central question,” says Daniel Hanna, Barclays’ global head of sustainable finance for its corporate and investment bank.
Climate finance will centre the discussion in Dubai, where sustainable finance activity has been increasing.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund raised $5.5 billion from a green bond sale in February, which Barclays wasn’t involved in.
Hanna says the bank also is exploring a number of potential debt-for-nature swap transactions, financial instruments that give countries access to debt relief in exchange for promises to protect their environments.
The return of bankers will create a big opportunity to talk up their efforts to help finance a quicker transition to green energy, one of the host nation’s key objectives, and earn some goodwill from a public increasingly skeptical of lofty promises that green bonds and sustainable investing can truly help the planet.
Bloomberg estimates that banks need to channel four times as much capital into renewable energy as they do into fossil fuels by the end of the decade for the world to have a chance of achieving net-zero emissions by midcentury.
