Environmental Standards For Lending
Environment is a key focus amongst ethical banks (in this field specially called sustainability or green banks) as well as amongst many conventional banks that wish to appear more ethically oriented or that see switching to more environmental practices to be to their advantage. Some view this move as green washing. In general bankers "consider themselves to be in a relatively environmentally friendly industry (in terms of emissions and pollution). However, given their potential exposure to risk, they have been surprisingly slow to examine the environmental performance of their clients. A stated reason for this is that such an examination would ‘require interference’ with a client's activities."Jeucken 2002 While the desire to not meddle in the business of the client is valid, one could also note that banks are required to interfere in the business of their clients regularly to ensure that the clients’ business plan is viable before issuing them a loan. The kind of analysis that all banks partake in is termed a single bottom line analysis (this analysis only considers financial performance). It is arguable whether or not performing a triple bottom line analysis (an analysis that takes into account environmental, social, and financial performance) would be any more intrusive.
Read more about this topic: Ethical Banking
Famous quotes containing the words standards and/or lending:
“With his brows knit, his mind made up, his will resolved and resistless, he advances, crashing his way through the host of weak, half-formed, dilettante opinions, honest and dishonest ways of thinking, with their standards raised, sentimentalities and conjectures, and tramples them all into dust. See how he prevails; you don’t even hear the groans of the wounded and dying.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And lending it one mental fillip the more, the fact that all these people were inwardly attacked by well-nigh resistless decay, and that most of them were feverish.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)