Yes. Reporting on an Urgewald analysis says some banks associated with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) continued financing coal-related companies from 2022 through 2025. But “financing” here includes both loans and underwriting, and the analysis attributes only a share of some companies’ financing to coal. It does not mean every named bank directly funded a new coal mine or power plant. NZBA membership was a voluntary net-zero and target-setting commitment, not a blanket ban on coal finance.
What the report says about banks and coal finance
A Climate Change News article published October 2, 2026, summarizing Urgewald’s findings, describes mixed trends among NZBA banks active in coal finance between 2022 and 2025: roughly half increased their coal-related finance and roughly half reduced it. The comparison counts loans and underwriting, rather than lending alone. It therefore describes a divided trend, not a uniform increase across all member banks.
The article identifies Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Santander as heavily involved in NZBA and the wider Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero when it launched ahead of COP26 in 2021. It separately names seven banks that provided loans or underwriting to Glencore in the preceding year: Bank of America, Citigroup, Santander, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Standard Chartered. These are two distinct lists; the Glencore example does not establish that HSBC or Standard Chartered belonged to the launch group described in the article.
The Glencore example
Climate Change News describes Glencore as a Switzerland-based company that received 4% of its revenue from coal. The article says Glencore received loans and underwriting from the seven banks listed above in the prior year, after winning preliminary regulatory approval to continue coal mining in Australia’s Hunter Valley until 2045. This is an example of company financing, not evidence that each bank financed the Hunter Valley operation directly.
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What the alliance required—and what it did not
According to UNEP Finance Initiative, NZBA members independently committed to transition their financing activities toward pathways consistent with net zero by 2050 at the latest and to set intermediate sector targets for 2030 or earlier. The commitment concerned alignment and target-setting; it did not itself require members to stop all fossil-fuel financing. Climate Change News reports that the alliance did not require members to end such finance.
Nor did the alliance impose a single coal-target boundary. Its 2024 report describes coal emissions as spanning mining of thermal and metallurgical coal, transport, and end-use combustion in industrial applications. A bank’s stated target or policy could therefore cover a different perimeter from another bank’s. Membership alone does not tell a reader which coal activities a particular bank restricted, or whether it had a coal phase-out policy.
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Climate Change News reports that NZBA requirements were diluted in April 2025 and that the alliance shut down in October 2025 after further withdrawals. These developments mean NZBA should be described as a historical alliance, not a current forum whose membership guarantees a common coal policy.
What the alliance’s 2024 figures show
The alliance’s 2024 progress materials provide a historical snapshot, based on information submitted through May 2024; they are not current membership or policy counts.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches| Measure | Reported figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| NZBA membership | 43 banks at launch in April 2021; 144 reported by UNEP FI in 2024 | The 2024 progress page gives the membership trajectory. Its progress report summarized submissions from 122 member banks received through May 2024. |
| Banks reporting coal targets or phase-out policies | 36 | Reported in the NZBA’s 2024 materials; the figure is historical and does not show the policy of every member. |
| Banks reporting no coal-sector exposure | 51 | Reported in the NZBA’s 2024 materials; it is not a current count. |
| Banks reporting coal phase-out policies | 14 | Reported in the NZBA’s 2024 materials. |
| Common phase-out dates among those policies | 2030 in OECD countries; 2040 in non-OECD countries | The most common dates reported by NZBA in 2024, not a universal deadline imposed on members. |
How coal finance was counted
Urgewald’s analysis, as described by Climate Change News, includes loans and underwriting and allocates a portion of a company’s financing to coal based on the share of its revenue derived from coal. For example, the article explains that a hypothetical $100 million loan to RWE would be counted as $21 million of coal finance if 21% of RWE’s revenue came from coal.
This revenue-based allocation can capture financing to a diversified company without identifying the money as a loan for a specific coal asset. Climate Change News also notes that the analysis does not distinguish companies expanding coal activity from companies phasing it out while shifting toward greener alternatives. The figures should therefore be read as attributed company finance, not as a tally of direct project finance for new mines or plants.
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Separate U.S. figures show why source and scope matter
A 2026 Still Banking on Coal media briefing gives a separate U.S. comparison: it says coal financing by U.S. banks rose from $13.6 billion in 2022 to $16.7 billion in 2025. The briefing also reports these bank-level figures:
| Bank | 2022 coal financing | 2025 coal financing |
|---|---|---|
| Bank of America | $1.5 billion | $2.3 billion |
| JPMorgan Chase | $1.5 billion | $2.2 billion |
| Wells Fargo | $1.2 billion | $1.9 billion |
These are figures attributed to the 2026 briefing, not a finding that every bank in the table was an NZBA member or that its calculation uses precisely the same company set and attribution method as the Urgewald analysis summarized by Climate Change News. The briefing characterizes global coal finance as broadly flatlining while noting regional differences; it says Chinese banks account for over 60% of total bank flows to the coal industry and U.S. banks are the largest coal financiers outside China. Those global comparisons are also the briefing’s findings, not alliance statistics.
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What this does—and does not—say about individual banks
The reporting supports a narrow conclusion: some banks associated with NZBA continued to provide loans or underwriting connected to coal companies, and reported coal-related finance moved in both directions among alliance banks active in coal during 2022–2025. It does not establish that alliance membership caused those trends, that every bank increased its financing, or that the attributed amounts went to new coal projects.
The alliance’s 2024 policy snapshot and the 2026 reporting answer different questions: the former records what banks reported about targets and exposure through May 2024; the latter summarizes financing trends over 2022–2025. The available reporting does not provide a bank-by-bank follow-up showing how policies or financing changed after NZBA’s 2025 closure. A reliable comparison of any two banks would need the same period and methodology, plus the scope of each bank’s coal policy and a distinction between corporate finance and project finance.
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