ABA welcomes APRA’s Climate Information Paper

The Australian Banking Association (ABA) today welcomes the release of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s (APRA) Climate Vulnerability Assessment Results Information Paper (CVA) and notes the key finding that banks are well positioned to manage climate financial risk.

The ABA looks forward to considering the report in detail. 

The CVA was developed by APRA in collaboration with Australia’s five largest banks and facilitated by the Australian Banking Association (ABA), in 2021/2022 to assess the nature and extent of climate risks to financial institutions and the financial system. 

While this remains a developing area of analysis the CVA provided a collaborative process to explore the impact of potential future climate pathways. It is an emergent and important method for understanding climate change financial risk. 

APRA first published the Climate Vulnerability Assessment Information Paper in September 2021, which provided information on the key design features of the CVA. It also provided a comparison of similar work undertaken by international regulatory peers. 

The CVA released today will inform future industry efforts in using scenario analysis as a tool for understanding climate change related financial risks. 

The ABA considers clear, transparent, comprehensive, and comparable disclosure of sustainability-related information to be part of the foundation of a well-functioning global financial system. We note the IFRS draft standards requirement for the publication of climate-related scenario analysis under the ‘[Draft] IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures’.  

The ABA looks forward to working with the Australian Government to identify key data sets and methodologies that will enable the production of these disclosures.  

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