“This is not mainstream yet,” she mentioned. “It is still a nascent industry but there are so many people who are focused on this, who have realised that they need to have a strategy, and they need to start operationalising.”
She added: “All the main financial institutions have signed up to net-zero targets by 2050 and so are going to have to transition and start pivoting their businesses.
“So I’m starting to have conversations with mainstream financial organisations who are saying: ‘Actually we’re starting to take a slightly different view of the risk we’re willing to take, we’re starting to shift our risk appetite a little bit if something is green versus if it isn’t’.”
It comes after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak introduced a slowdown to the tempo of UK net-zero initiatives, prompting considerations about enterprise and funding uncertainty.
Rob Doepel, managing companion for sustainability at EY, instructed the occasion: “We’re in an international race for capital.”
“We have a lot of competing geographies for that capital so it’s important from a UK perspective to think how do we make sure we have that capital here in the UK,” he added.
Ms Thomas additionally warned that the UK should keep within the race for inexperienced funding as China , the US and the EU push forward, including that net-zero should not change into a “political football”.
“We have the deepest pools of institutional capital in the world, we have a world-leading capital market, we have an opportunity to actually make sure we are at the forefront of actually capitalising private capital by using Government money (and) Government regulation in a smart way,” she mentioned.
“We have the opportunity to attract those jobs and prosperity to the UK.
“We really cannot afford in the next year to have this agenda be turned into a political football.
“It is based on science, it is inevitable and the UK needs to be at the forefront of it.”
On companies collaborating with scientists, she mentioned: “Hearteningly we are seeing a number of organisations bringing in climate scientists as advisers and actually either advising their board or coming into the organisation themselves because it is so critical.
“It is becoming more and more embedded but it needs to be done proactively. It is not going to happen by osmosis.”
Meanwhile, Bevis Watts, chief govt of the UK department of Dutch moral financial institution Triados, additionally described the UK monetary sector as being “at a nascent phase” relating to the inexperienced transition.
He mentioned: “There is the good, there is the bad, there is greenwashing, there are people who are presenting things as game changing, delivering things that frankly aren’t that useful or shifting on what we’ve historically done.
“The ugly truth in it to me is that we are so slow to address it in the financial sector.”
He referred to as for extra crimson strains and regulation round banking moderately than merely taking a danger administration method.
Mr Watts added: “We try to be a reference point to prove this can be different, that you can run a profitable growing successful business with 22 billion assets under management and three quarters of a million customers to try and say to the wider sector that there is a different model.”
