By Ivan Frishberg First Vice President Sustainability Banking, Amalgamated Bank
While sitting in your living room at home, a 0.9 Fahrenheit degree increase in temperature might not send you running to crank up the air conditioner but when it comes to permanently heating the entire planet, it has the potential to cause some serious problems.
Already having witnessed an increase in the number of devastating storms, fires, heat waves and droughts with 1.8 degrees of global warming over the last ten years, things stand to get substantially worse with the 2.7 degrees of global warming expected to take place in the next 10-20 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a study last month outlining these recent findings and called for urgent and unprecedented changes in order to mitigate the drastic effects of a continued rise in temperature. Amalgamated Bank is answering the call.
As America’s socially responsible bank, we want to lead the efforts of the financial community to combat climate change and find ways in which fellow institutions could follow suit. The IPCC report offers a summary of their findings which includes four main takeaways and a series of recommendations to help mitigate climate change that are ranked on a scale from “less likely” to “most likely” in terms of the level of confidence of their effectiveness. Receiving a “very high confidence” rating was the assertion that “partnerships involving non-state public and private actors, institutional investors, the banking system, civil society and scientific institutions would facilitate actions and responses consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.” After the administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, the onus now lies with businesses and other institutions to take matters into their own hands to combat climate change. At Amalgamated, we read that as “it’s time to take action now” and so we’ve launched our initiative to align all of our lending with the Paris Climate Agreement.
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Courtesy of Amalgamated Bank.
