Last Updated on: 6th August 2024, 05:53 pm
Acknowledging the essential role that banks can play in safeguarding and restoring nature and our environment, the global sustainability academy for bankers, the Principles for Responsible Banking Academy (PRB Academy), has launched a new course titled “Applying Nature-Responsible Banking“. This course focuses on practical strategies for banks either engaging with or considering engagement with nature.
Our world is confronted with a triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and the loss of nature and biodiversity. The World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that a nature-positive pathway could generate over US$10 trillion in new annual business value, underscoring the need for banks to play a larger role in addressing the biodiversity funding gap.
The purpose of this course is to explore the ‘how’, explaining what banks need to do to minimise their negative impacts on nature and progress towards more positive impacts. The primary aim is to equip individuals with the critical knowledge and skills needed to navigate the nature-positive transition, thereby creating better scenarios for the environment, banks, and their customers.
This course is aligned with The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework, which promotes integrating nature into strategic and capital allocation decision-making. To facilitate the course’s learning outcomes, a fictional bank is used as a case study, with learners stepping into the role of a sustainability expert. This role includes exploring nature-related issues relevant to the bank, such as identifying and assessing impacts, dependencies, and risks from a fictitious loan portfolio, and making recommendations for developing a nature-related strategy.
Joanne Murphy, Interim Chief Executive of the Chartered Banker Institute, remarked:
“The Chartered Banker Institute is delighted to launch this new nature course with our partners. It builds on the introductory course on nature we launched earlier this year and is designed to help learners apply a nature-responsible approach to all aspects of banking, reducing negative impacts on nature and moving towards positive and sustainable outcomes for people and the planet. Mobilising finance to support nature-positive outcomes can offer new opportunities for banks and their customers, as banks and bankers are uniquely positioned to enhance the resilience of our planet and societies to halt and reverse nature loss. Integrating this applied nature course into bank’s existing internal learning and development for employees provides a simple solution to further progress this essential work.”
