In the UK as elsewhere, we are seeing extreme weather conditions, which will continue to worsen as we approach 2050, and perhaps beyond. Against this background, financial institutions of all kinds – banks, asset managers and insurers – need to put in place climate adaptation plans as part of their overall business continuity planning. These need to include the direct impact of climate change on running their own businesses and the indirect impact of the changing climate on borrowers, investee companies, policy holders, suppliers, employees and other stakeholders.

City & Financial Global’s 2nd Annual Biodiversity and Nature Markets Summit builds on the success of our Biodiversity Summit last year, which was widely regarded as providing a valuable introduction for financial institutions and corporates to the risks posed by biodiversity loss, and the opportunities presented by nature-based solutions.

This year’s programme goes deeper into this important subject and takes as its central theme biodiversity credit markets and other nature-based markets.  We will be exploring how financial institutions and corporates should be using these rapidly developing markets in order to reduce their impact on nature and biodiversity. Of course, we will also review best practice in terms of how companies should evaluate and monitor their biodiversity impact, including via the acquisition of reliable data, the role of satellite technology for monitoring purposes and the new investment opportunities that the development of nature markets now offers. The full agenda can be found here.

The 14th annual edition of City Week was held in-person in Central London, and was streamed live on our media channels, over two days between 20-21 May 2024. As in previous years, CW2024 was organised in partnership with the UK Government, the City of London Corporation, TheCityUK, UK Finance and leading City institutions.

City Week brought together more than 1,000 top-level senior decision-makers from UK and overseas financial institutions for a comprehensive programme of cutting-edge presentations, panel discussions, social events and networking. Like previous editions, this year’s forum featured many well-known names from the global financial services industry, the world of politics and the international regulatory community.

The increasing use of climate change-related litigation and activism is becoming a risk which UK businesses of all types cannot afford to ignore. City & Financial Global’s Climate and ESG Legal Risk Management Summit 2024, which was held on 25 March, provided delegates with a thorough analysis of all the key issues and practical guidance on how to mitigate the risk effectively.

The third edition built on the success of the previous year's event, which was widely regarded as providing a valuable forum which helped companies, financiers and their advisers gain a much better understanding of how to mitigate the risk of litigation and activism effectively.

This Summit covered how data lies at the heart of the revolution in climate reporting and ESG investing, and is, in many ways, its Achilles’ heel. Investee companies can still use a variety of different approaches to how they report ESG data, and what data they report, although the new ISSB standards will improve this situation when they come into effect. Asset managers are subject to a variety of different ESG regulatory reporting regimes and taxonomies across the world, despite recent efforts at harmonisation. Sourcing accurate and consistent highly quality ESG data is a major problem, as the market for its supply is very fragmented and wide ranging in terms of quality. Then there is the challenge of managing and integrating ESG data from diverse sources into a coherent system. And, of course, the metrics and methodologies used by rating agencies are far from consistent, not to mention the potential inconsistencies between the ‘E’, ‘S’ and ‘G’ of ESG, and the weighting to be given to each element. The ESG data challenge is a serious issue for all companies and financial institutions.