Sustainable Finance & Financed Emissions for Banks
Green and sustainability-linked instruments, PCAF financed emissions, WACI, ESRM categories, climate risk and central bank expectations.
- Last updated 12 Nov 2026
- English
- Advanced
- 7 CPD hours
What you’ll learn
- Distinguish use-of-proceeds and sustainability-linked instruments and design credible KPIs and SPTs
- Calculate PCAF attribution and financed emissions across major asset classes
- Assign and aggregate PCAF data quality scores and compute economic intensity and WACI
- Categorise transactions A, B or C and convert findings into testable E&S covenants
- Assess physical and transition climate risk at borrower and portfolio level
- Map central bank expectations and build a consistent sustainability reporting stack
Course content
6 sections · 24 lessons · 7h 0m total length
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From reputation to balance sheet
For a bank, sustainability used to mean a charity budget and an annual report chapter. Today it is part of credit risk, capital planning, product design and regulatory reporting. Three forces explain the shift.
- Risk: climate change and environmental degradation affect borrowers' cash flows and collateral values. A hotel on an eroding coast, a factory facing carbon costs on exports to the EU, or a farm in a drought-prone area are credit risks.
- Regulation: central banks and supervisors, from the Central Bank of Egypt to the European Central Bank, the Central Bank of Kenya and the Banco Central do Brasil, expect banks to identify, manage and disclose climate and environmental risks.
- Opportunity: demand for financing of renewable energy, efficiency, water infrastructure, clean transport and inclusive finance is large and growing, and green and social bond markets give banks access to dedicated investor capital.
A bank's largest footprint is financed
A bank's own offices, branches and data centres emit relatively little. Its loans and investments finance companies and assets that emit far more. Under the GHG Protocol, these are Scope 3, category 15 (investments), and the PCAF standard provides the method to measure them. For most banks, financed emissions are hundreds or thousands of times larger than operational emissions.
The building blocks of this course
Area Key question Instruments How do green, social and sustainability-linked loans and bonds work? Financed emissions How much of each borrower's emissions belongs to the bank? Portfolio metrics How carbon-intensive is the portfolio, and how good is the data? ESRM How are environmental and social risks of each transaction assessed? Climate risk How do physical and transition risks affect credit quality? Supervision What do central banks expect, and what must be reported? Vignette: an Egyptian bank in 2023
A mid-sized Egyptian bank had to meet the CBE's binding sustainable finance regulations: semi-annual status reports, a quarterly quantitative report on sustainable financing in the credit portfolio, and an annual GRI-based sustainability report by 31 March (as recorded in Phi's research notes). It realised its loan system had no field to tag the purpose of a facility, no borrower emissions data and no structured environmental and social risk categories. The project that followed touched credit policy, IT, relationship managers and the board: sustainability became a core banking process, not a report.
Roles inside the bank
- Relationship managers collect borrower data and see only their own borrowers.
- Sustainability sets methods and reviews data.
- Risk integrates climate and E&S risk into credit assessment.
- Compliance signs off regulatory returns.
- Internal audit has read-only access to test controls.
This is the role model used in Phi's bank module, and it reflects good practice: separation of duties between those who collect, those who assess and those who sign off.
· Article Preview 20:00 - Green, social and sustainability bonds and loans · Article 22:00
- Sustainability-linked loans and bonds · Article 22:00
- Credibility: external review, taxonomies and greenwashing risk · Article 20:00
- Knowledge check · Quiz 04:00
- PCAF fundamentals · Article 22:00
- Business loans and listed equity: worked attribution · Article 25:00
- Project finance, real estate, mortgages, vehicles and sovereigns · Article 22:00
- Data quality scores and estimation · Article 22:00
- Knowledge check · Quiz 04:00
- Aggregating financed emissions and intensity · Article 22:00
- Weighted average carbon intensity (WACI) · Article 20:00
- Setting portfolio targets and engaging borrowers · Article 22:00
- Knowledge check · Quiz 03:00
- The ESRM framework and categorisation · Article 22:00
- Due diligence, action plans and E&S covenants · Article 22:00
- Screening rules, controls and documentation · Article 20:00
- Knowledge check · Quiz 04:00
- Physical and transition risk: how climate becomes credit risk · Article 22:00
- Climate risk assessment and scenario analysis · Article 22:00
- Central bank expectations across our regions · Article 22:00
- Building the bank's sustainability reporting stack · Article 20:00
- Knowledge check · Quiz 04:00
- Final assessment · Quiz 12:00
Requirements
- Familiarity with corporate lending or credit analysis
- Basic understanding of Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions
Who this course is for
- Bank sustainability, credit risk and ESRM teams
- Relationship managers and credit analysts
- Compliance and regulatory reporting staff in financial institutions
- Phi bank module users
Description
For a bank, the largest climate impact and risk sit in its loan book. This advanced course gives bankers, risk managers and sustainability teams the methods to measure, manage and report it.
You will learn how green, social and sustainability-linked loans and bonds work, calculate financed emissions with the PCAF standard across business loans, project finance, real estate, mortgages, vehicles and sovereign debt, assign data quality scores, and compute portfolio metrics including economic intensity and WACI. You will then apply environmental and social risk management (categories A, B and C), draft testable covenants, assess physical and transition climate risk, and map supervisory expectations from the Central Bank of Egypt (as recorded in Phi's research notes), the Central Bank of Kenya, Brazil, the Gulf and the ECB.
Worked numerical examples run through every module, and the course shows how Phi's bank module supports borrowers, facilities, covenants, assessments and portfolio views with maker-checker controls.
Your instructor
Sustainability, governance and investor-relations faculty at Corprise.ai
- 0 students
- 30 courses
Corprise Academy is the teaching team behind Phi and Corprise IR. Our courses are written from real reporting projects in Egypt, the Gulf, North Africa and Europe.
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Sustainable Finance & Financed Emissions for Banks
$ 199.00
Course preview