Banks are finally starting to account for climate change risk

SINGAPORE (Sept 16): Behind the scenes at some of the world’s biggest banks, small teams of employees are busy trying to calculate what might prove to be one of the most important numbers any financial institution will ever disclose: how much the assets on their balance sheet are contributing to global warming.

One of those people is Kaitlin Crouch at ING Groep. For the past five years, she has been dissecting transactions — from corporate loans to residential mortgages — to test ways of measuring the Dutch lender’s overall carbon footprint.