Our climate-related financial disclosures

Overview

We recognise the importance of decision-useful climate-related financial disclosure (climate discolsure) in enabling effective measurement, management and mitigation of climate-related financial risks (climate risks) across the economy. This is reflected in the inclusion of climate disclosure in our supervisory expectations, as well as the publication of our Climate Transition Plan and the commitment we made in June 2020 to issue an annual climate disclosure. 

Our most recent climate disclosure sets out the progress we have made in our climate-related work since February 2025. It covers:

• the climate risks to which the Bank is exposed;
• the arising from the Bank’s own financial and physical operations (used as a proxy for financial risk); and
• the Bank’s work on climate change in pursuit of its core mission.

Progress highlights are:

Financial operations

Climate-related financial disclosure

The Bank assesses the climate risks to the market operations that it engages in to achieve its monetary policy and financial stability objectives. This includes holding fixed-income instruments and offering secured lending and repo to financial counterparties. The Bank’s most recent annual climate disclosure provides information on this work.

Greening the Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme

In March 2020, Governor Andrew Bailey outlined our intention to assess ways that our holdings of corporate bonds could be adjusted to take the climate impact of issuers into account while still meeting our monetary policy objectives. 

Following a change to the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) remit in May 2021, we set out in a Discussion Paper in May 2021 our proposals for ‘greening’ our Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme (CBPS). Andrew Hauser set out the approach proposed in this Discussion Paper in his speech: It’s not easy being green – but that shouldn’t stop us: how central banks can use their monetary policy portfolios to support orderly transition to net zero.

The purpose of this Discussion Paper was to seek feedback on the principles that might guide how best to incentivise transition to net zero via the CBPS; and the tools we might use to do it. It highlighted some of the key challenges and design choices and set out a number of questions on which we gathered feedback.

In November 2021, we set out our approach to greening the CBPS. This followed the publication of a CBPS Discussion Paper, and subsequent engagement with a wide range of stakeholders including net zero investment experts, asset managers, climate groups and the wider public. The approach, published alongside a Market Notice, implements the principles set out in the Discussion Paper. Adjustments to the CBPS would commence from November 2021. A programme of reinvestment operations based on this framework was completed between November 2021 and January 2022. More information on this can be found in the Bank’s 2022 and 2023 climate-related financial disclosures. Following the MPC’s decision to begin exiting quantitative easing in February 2022, the CBPS has now been completely unwound.

Physical operations

We are committed to running our own physical operations responsibly and sustainably. Key milestones in our journey, include: 

• 2020 - We set a target of reducing our absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 63% from 2016 to 2030, covering our Scope 1 emissions (use of natural gas, fuel and refrigerants), Scope 2 emissions (electricity) and travel emissions included within Scope 3 emissions. This level of reduction is consistent with aligning emissions from our physical operations to the goals of the Paris Agreement. 
• 2021 - We committed to target net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from our physical operations more broadly by 2050 at the latest. 
• 2022 - We committed to publish our transition plan for reaching this net-zero goal for our physical operations. 
• June 2023 - We published our Climate Transition Plan, which announced the Bank’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its physical operations to net zero by 2040 and set out the Bank’s approach to deliver that commitment, including interim milestones.
• June 2026 – We published the first update of our Climate Transition Plan, setting out progress made to transition the Bank of England’s physical operations to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.

In addition to the Bank’s decarbonisation targets, we also run a Greener Bank programme aiming to reduce the environmental impact of the Bank’s day-to-day operations.