Earth Day – building our tomorrow, today
Friday 21 April 2023
Tomorrow we will celebrate Earth Day, a precious reminder of our planet’s natural resources and the countless services they provide make human life possible.
Since its first event in 1970, Earth Day has sought to diversify, educate, and activate the environmental movement worldwide – working with more than 150,000 partners in 192 countries.
As a continuation of last year’s campaign, this year’s theme is focused on engaging governments, institutions, businesses, and the more than one billion citizens who participate annually in Earth Day to do their part – with everyone accounted for, and everyone accountable.
So, the big question is how are we holding ourselves accountable?
Our ESG strategy reflects our ambition to position ourselves as a bank of reference on ESG issues and is based on three guiding principles:
- We hold ourselves to the highest possible standards in order to do the right thing both for our clients and society.
- We are fully committed to supporting our clients in a just and fair transition.
- We reflect and respect the views of our stakeholders in our business and decision-making processes.
Our commitments
• Under UniCredit Unlocked, we targeted €150bn euros of new ESG volumes over 2022-2024 across Environmental Lending, ESG Investment Products, Sustainable Bonds and Social Lending and have been progressing well towards achieving these goals, mobilizing in 2022, €11.4bn of Environmental Lending, €28.7bn of ESG Investment Products, €12.8bn of Sustainable Bonds and €4.8bn of Social Lending.
• In 2022, we achieved a 14% reduction in our own GHG emissions year-on-year.
• We are committed to reach the Net Zero goal on financed emissions by 2050, recently publishing our targets on the first carbon intensive sectors: Oil & Gas, Power Generation and Automotive.
• Moreover, we are also part of the Principles for Responsible Banking (including the PRB's commitment on Financial Health and Inclusion), a member of the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance (with the aim to support the deployment of hydrogen technologies by 2030), the Ellen MacArthur Foundation network committed to Circular Economy and have signed up to the Sustainable STEEL Principles and Finance for Biodiversity Pledge as the first bank from Italy at COP15.
• Finally, we recently achieved our plastic-free target, progressively removing single-use plastic items from all canteens, cafeterias and coffee and vending machines as we continue to reduce the environmental impact of our operations.
We know that fulfilling our uniting and common purpose of empowering communities to progress would not be possible without the highest standards of ESG across our bank.
For more information around how we are keeping ESG at the very heart of our activities, please visit the microsite dedicated to our 2022 Integrated Report, with additional colour around our efforts to protect Natural Capital available here.