MADRID, 12 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
This Tuesday, the presidents of BBVA, CaixaBank, Mapfre and Banco Santander defended inclusion and growth as essential factors to successfully achieve the energy transition.
Carlos Torres (BBVA), José Ignacio Goirigolzarri (CaixaBank), Antonio Huertas (Mapfre) and Ana Botín (Banco Santander) have expressed themselves in this sense during their participation in a round table organized by the Financial Initiative of the United Nations Development Program Environment (UNEP FI).
The president of BBVA has stressed that society not only faces the challenge of climate change, but also preserves natural capital and achieves sustainable growth. And he has indicated that these three objectives “require massive investments.”
Furthermore, Torres has pointed out that investments must make economic sense not only for the banks, but for whoever is actually making that investment. “If there is no actor who wants to invest, then there is nothing to finance,” she stressed.
For her part, the executive president of Banco Santander, Ana Botín, has placed emphasis on ‘green growth’. “We are not going to be able to have ‘green’ societies and companies if we do not have growth,” she explained, adding that the financial sector has to be able to finance the transition from ‘brown’ to ‘green’.
“Asking European banks to finance ‘green’ houses in some remote region of Brazil is not very realistic,” said Botín. The president has also indicated that financial entities need “much more capital” to finance the transition, which is why she has indicated that “it is not a good idea” for regulators to request additional capital for ‘green’ financing.
Furthermore, Botín recalled that governments worldwide “have a lot of debt”, so if private capital cannot be mobilized, the energy transition will not be achieved.
The president of CaixaBank, for his part, has asked that the definition of the regulatory framework be “flexible and coherent”, while calling for good quality of the data and the way it is reported, as well as achieving a taxonomy, which is a “very important challenge.”
Goirigolzarri has also added that the amount of money that must be mobilized to fulfill the energy transition “is a tremendous challenge.” Likewise, he has indicated that the objective of banks should not be to follow regulation, since regulation always lags behind the trends of society.
The president of Mapfre, Antonio Huertas, has stressed that the work of both insurers and the rest of the actors in society must be to “accelerate inclusion”, and has insisted that small and medium-sized companies are “very important” to achieve this transition.
In addition, Huertas has indicated that insurers need to collaborate with public organizations and private companies because they do not have “infinite financial capacity”, so they need this type of alliances to achieve “affordable products.”
In this context, the president of the insurance company has demanded that the energy transition be intergenerationally fair, taking into account the impact it has on the generation of people who have had to undertake it. “We cannot leave them without economic activity for environmental reasons, without offering them a sustainable alternative to continue earning a living,” he added.
