Climate change is one of the most pressing problems of our time. It affects our owner-customers and operating region in the long run. OP Financial Group’s mission is to promote the sustainable prosperity, security and wellbeing of our two million owner-customers and our operating region. It is a promise that requires us to take action. For this reason, OP's goal for 2020 is 20 climate actions.
Why 20 climate actions?
• More and more people, especially younger generations, are worried about climate change and its effects.
• There is plenty of information about climate change, but making decisions about measures to fight it is a slow and difficult process. One example of this was the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid in December 2019.
• Climate change is such an enormous and complicated matter that it takes time to make internationally binding regulations. This has been evident also in the finalisation of the EU taxonomy defining the criteria for green finance and sustainable business.
• Companies and the financial sector have a key role in the work against climate change – reducing climate change and adapting to it require huge investments. In the EU alone, the transition to a carbon neutral economy calls for annual investments of 270 billion euros.
• Slowing down climate change requires actions from everyone and we will do our share. Fostering a sustainable economy is one of the cornerstones of our newly updated Corporate Social Responsibility Programme. We want this decade to be the decade of solutions.
Learn more about OP Corporate Social Responsibility Programme
What are OP's 20 climate actions?
• These actions will be post gradually during 2020.
• During 2020, they will launch new financing products aimed at reducing climate change, channel investments to reducing climate change, help their customers to become more aware of how their every-day life affects the climate, support companies’ journeys towards more sustainable economic growth with loans based on sustainability criteria, support the agricultural and forestry sector on the road to a more sustainable tomorrow and do their part in providing more information about the economic impacts of climate change.
• In their own operations, they are aiming to become carbon neutral by 2025.
• They believe that the big problems of our time can be solved. The common future requires responsible actions.
Source: OP Website