Cop26 could be a watershed in greening the financial sector | Howard Davies

New initiatives could give bankers the tools to help their clients fund and manage the green transition

The recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop26) in Glasgow was, it seems, a historic success. We have this on no lesser authority than that of the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, who happened to be the meeting's host. The Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, also was upbeat afterward regarding the 2015 Paris climate agreement's target of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. We set out by saying we wanted to keep 1.5C within reach," Sharma said. We did do that." And Johnson claimed that there was little difference between the proposed Cop26 agreement to phase out" coal usage and the final text, which pledged only to phase down" coal.

Others took a different view. Perhaps predictably, the teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg described the conference categorically as a failure". Climate Action Tracker projects that even if all the Cop26 pledges stretching into the future are met, the planet is on track to warm by at least 2.1C. And India is phasing out in the particular sense of phasing in, with coal-powered electricity generation expected to increase by almost 5% a year this decade. The Financial Times's Martin Wolf hedged his bets. For him, Cop26 was both triumph and disaster".