Government launches Green Finance Strategy

On 2 July 2019, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published the government’s Green Finance Strategy, partly in response to the Green Finance Taskforce’s March 2018 report. The Strategy sets out the actions that the government will take to:

• Ensure that current and future financial risks and opportunities from climate and environmental factors are integrated into mainstream financial decision-making, and that markets for green financial products are robust. The Strategy refers to this as “greening finance”. It includes a government expectation that all listed companies and large asset owners will disclose in line with the Financial Stability Board’s (FSB) task force on climate-related financial disclosures (TCFD) recommendations by 2022.
• Accelerate finance to support the delivery of the UK’s carbon targets and clean growth, resilience and environmental ambitions, and international objectives. The Strategy refers to this as “financing green”.
• Ensure that UK financial services capture the domestic and international commercial opportunities arising from “greening finance”, such as climate-related data and analytics, and from “financing green”, such as new green financial products and services.

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