Volvo Cars to be fully electric by 2030

Volvo Cars is committed to becoming a leader in the fast-growing premium electric car market and plans to become a fully electric car company by 2030. By then, the company intends to only sell fully electric cars and phase out any car in its global portfolio with an internal combustion engine, including hybrids. The company’s transition towards becoming a fully electric car maker is part of its ambitious climate plan, which seeks to consistently reduce the life cycle carbon footprint per car through concrete action. Its decision also builds on…

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Kingfisher signs new £550m revolving credit facility linked to Responsible Business targets

Kingfisher plc, the international home improvement retailer whose businesses include B&Q and Screwfix, announces today that it has entered into a £550m three-year revolving credit facility agreement with a group of its relationship banks. The facility is linked to ambitious sustainability and community-based targets. Kingfisher has a long heritage as a responsible business. We were a founding member of the Forest Stewardship Council when it was established nearly 30 years ago to help the responsible sourcing of wood. We were also the first retailer to label and cut VOCs (volatile…

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Vattenfall issues GBP 250 million green hybrid bond

Vattenfall has successfully issued a GBP 250 million green fixed-rate hybrid bond. The issue was almost five times oversubscribed and the proceeds will finance investments that contribute to Vattenfall’s goal of enabling fossil-free living within one generation. This is Vattenfall’s first hybrid bond issued in GBP and also the first GBP issuance under the Green Bond Framework, published in 2019, where proceeds from the bonds are earmarked for investments in the following four eligible categories: 1) renewable energy and related infrastructure, 2) energy efficiency, 3) electrification of transport and heat…

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Six Global Banks Come Together to Decarbonize Steel

Several top lenders to the steel sector—Citi, Goldman Sachs, ING, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered, and UniCredit—have come together to define common standards of action for steel sector decarbonization through a collective climate-aligned finance agreement. A climate-aligned finance agreement establishes a framework for assessing and disclosing the degree to which the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a financial institution’s portfolio are in line with 1.5°C climate targets. The banks have formed the Steel Climate-Aligned Finance Working Group (the Working Group), facilitated by RMI’s Center for Climate-Aligned Finance, with the goal of…

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HSBC partners with WRI and WWF to scale next generation solutions to climate change

HSBC, in partnership with World Resources Institute (WRI) and WWF, have unveiled their Climate Solutions Partnership to unlock barriers to finance for companies and projects that tackle climate change. The partnership’s three workstreams focus on start-up firms developing carbon-cutting technologies, projects that protect and restore biodiversity, and initiatives to help transition energy growth to renewables in Asia. The partnership aims to bring emerging climate solutions to commercial viability and scale. It will do this by supporting sustainable projects that would otherwise face barriers to finance due to insufficient policy and…

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