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In April 2021, global banks and smaller lenders banded together in the world’s biggest climate finance coalition convened by the UK as host of the COP26 climate summit. A few short years later, a growing number have run for the exit, leaving the alliance in turmoil.
Members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) promised to progressively shift their investment dollars away from polluting industries and towards climate solutions such as renewable energy. They also pledged to set “science-based” goals for their businesses to reach net zero emissions no later than 2050.
UN special envoy and former central banker Mark Carney hailed the initiative – and its wider umbrella group called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero – as the “breakthrough” in climate finance that the world needed to mobilise trillions of dollars in support of a low-carbon economy.
But, nearly four years on, with climate change-sceptic Donald Trump back in the White House, Wall Street banking giants have led an exodus from the coalition, emboldening some Canadian and Australian peers to follow suit.
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The flight of some of the NZBA’s most influential members risks further damaging the relevance of an initiative that has been facing questions over its real-world climate credentials for some time.
Planet-heating fossil fuels continue to attract close to $700 billion a year from global banks. A first large-scale assessment, published by the European Central Bank (ECB), last year showed that being a signatory to the voluntary alliance – and others like it – had made a negligible difference in advancing climate goals.
Today, with the NZBA facing a reputational crisis, its remaining 135 members and watchers of ESG efforts are sparring over its purpose and where it should head next.
“It is a matter of survival for the coalition,” Quentin Aubineau, a policy analyst at BankTrack, an NGO that monitors commercial banks’ activities, told Climate Home.
Trump effect
Last December, exactly one month after Trump’s election win, Goldman Sachs quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance, opening the floodgates. The other top five US banks – JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley – all left over the next month. Canada’s biggest lenders followed soon after, with Australia’s Macquarie being the latest out of the door.
While none of the banks gave an official reason for exiting the alliance, observers believe the move came in reaction to political pressure from Republican officials in the US – which is widely expected to ramp up under the new pro-fossil fuel administration.
In 2022, attorneys-general from 19 Republican-led states launched an investigation into whether leading US banks were colluding under the NZBA to “starve companies engaged in fossil fuel-related activities of credit”.
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The campaign spread to Washington and, last December, a House committee dominated by Republicans said it had found “substantial evidence of collusion and anticompetitive behavior” by the financial industry to “impose radical ESG goals” on US companies.
“They [the banks] joined in a political context, and they are withdrawing in a political context,” said Brian O’Hanlon, managing director of the climate finance programme at RMI, a US-based think-tank that supports clean energy. RMI’s Center for Climate-Aligned Finance is a collaborating partner of the NZBA.
He added that in 2021, when the alliance was formed, the new administration under former President Joe Biden, a Democrat, put pressure on Wall Street institutions that were lagging behind their European peers on sustainability disclosures and climate finance.
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Under the NZBA, lenders voluntarily commit to aligning their operations with the global aim of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, setting targets to help achieve the goal and documenting their progress every year.
O’Hanlon said most banks saw the coalition primarily as an avenue to agree on standardised guidelines for drafting net zero policies and now, having built their internal capacity, some see more risk than benefit in being part of the club.
The banks that quit the NZBA have so far kept their net zero targets, but their track record raises questions about their commitment to reducing emissions.
Limited real-world impact
Big US and Canadian banks remain the world’s largest financial supporters of fossil fuels, according to a report by green groups called “Banking on Climate Chaos”. Some like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America even increased their fossil-fuel deals after joining the coalition, Bloomberg reported.
“NZBA was mostly an excuse for these banks because they haven’t done anything concrete to switch their business towards low-carbon except setting targets but without adopting clear policies,” said Aubineau of BankTrack, which contributed to the report.
North American lenders are not alone in this. While the NZBA includes some progressive signatories that do explicitly rule out support for climate-polluting businesses, member banks featured in the “Banking on Climate Chaos” assessment provided around $253 billion to companies expanding fossil fuels in 2023.
Meanwhile, for the ECB study, economists carried out a large-scale assessment of the lending behaviour of European banks and found virtually no difference between banks inside or outside of the coalition.
While European banks reduced their exposure to fossil fuels overall, NZBA members had neither divested from polluting companies nor engaged with them to push for emission-cutting measures any more than those without a climate commitment, according to the study.
“[The evidence] suggests that voluntary private-sector initiatives may have relatively little impact on decarbonization,” the authors concluded, calling on governments to improve the credibility of net zero promises in the private sector.
Expectation vs reality
The NZBA has been criticised repeatedly for a perceived failure to live up to its promise of fast-tracking a climate shift in finance.
BankTrack’s Aubineau said the NZBA leaves banks “a lot of room for manoeuvre” in how they set targets and communicate their actions, meaning “they can basically do whatever they want” with no accountability mechanism.
RMI’s O’Hanlon said the criticism is partly a consequence of the “inflated claims” made at the outset by the alliance which “raised expectations and obscured its meaning”.
“What GFANZ was doing in the first years was training for a race, but the rhetoric was that it was running the race and doing so with thoroughbred athletes,” he added.
Battle over NZBA’s future
Some of the NZBA’s remaining members, however, want to lead the pack and set a higher pace for transition. The Netherlands’ Triodos Bank and the UK’s Ecology Building Society threatened to quit the alliance in late 2023 over what they viewed as lax emissions reduction requirements.
But they eventually decided to stay, hoping to change the NZBA from the inside.
“By merely ‘encouraging’ disclosure of policies for the highest-emitting sectors, rather than requiring it, the [NZBA] guidelines undermine the transparency and action necessary to ensure safer climate outcomes,” they said in a letter written with the US-based Amalgamated Bank.
Following the US banks’ departure, the weight and make-up of the coalition have changed significantly. At its peak, the NZBA members had assets worth a combined $74 trillion – that is now down by a quarter. Meanwhile, European banks – which have so far stayed put – have gained greater influence.
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Aubineau told Climate Home the internal debate over the future direction of the coalition is now picking up pace.
“The NZBA is trying to choose between two options: lower the ambition again and try to keep as many banks as possible or try to strengthen the guidance and move forward with those that are really committed,” he said.
While the departure of the US banks should be “a key opportunity” to turn a page and bolster commitments, “unfortunately, I think the NZBA might be considering the first option”, he warned.
HSBC – a founding member of the NZBA – ditched on Wednesday a target of reaching net-zero carbon emissions across its business by 2030 citing slow change in the real economy.
A decision over the direction of travel is expected in the next few months by the steering group, which includes both progressive lenders, including Amalgamated Bank, and some of the world’s top fossil fuel financiers, like Japan’s MUFG and Spain’s BBVA.
RMI’s O’Hanlon said that, while NZBA members should work out what the coalition is trying to achieve, climate regulations and government economic policy provide stronger transition levers than a voluntary framework.
“Incentives have always shaped the economic case for these financial institutions,” he added. “If the government tilts the market and the playing field to disadvantage certain technologies that are lower carbon, you will see a knock-on effect,” he added.
The post The world’s biggest climate finance coalition is in crisis. Is it worth saving? appeared first on Climate Home News.
The world’s biggest climate finance coalition is in crisis. Is it worth saving?
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year higher than in last year’s budget.
This is largely because the report now estimates a smaller “cement carbonation” sink in the wake of research published this year in Communications Sustainability. In other words, it estimates that cement is able to slowly reabsorb less CO2 over its lifetime than previously thought.
Estimates of land-use emissions have also been revised, including a spike in 2018 – visible in the chart above – linked to updated cropland data for Colombia.
The updated numbers show that total emissions have grown by 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over 2006-15.
Fossil emissions grew about 0.9% per year in the past decade, compared with 1.9% the decade before. Over the same period, land-use emissions have declined.
While the slowdown reflects real progress, a plateau in emissions is still a long way from the rapid declines needed to reach net-zero emissions and stabilise global temperatures.
With human-caused warming reaching 1.37C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) in 2025, the report estimates that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C, with a 50% chance, is 150GtCO2 from the start of 2027. That is less than four years of 2026 emissions.
Meanwhile, the budgets for 1.7C and 2C are 510GtCO2 and 1,035GtCO2, respectively – or around 12 and 24 years of current emissions.
Fossil emissions made up around 88% of total CO2 emissions over the past decade, with land-use change making up the remaining 12%.
This is a marked change from the first half of the 20th century, when land-use emissions were larger than those from fossil fuels.
The figure below shows global emissions, split into fossil and land-use components.