BBVA has released its updated financing policy addressing sectors that have a serious environmental or social impact. The main change to the policy is the inclusion of more limits and a tightening of restrictions for the mining, energy, infrastructure, and agribusiness sectors. In addition, the updated policy provides clear guidance on the management of clients and business activities related to these industries. The transportation of tar sands has been explicitly added to list of prohibited activities.

The impact of human action on biodiversity is a challez nge that remains unresolved. Numerous scientific studies confirm that these changes are causing the extinction of more and more species – the consequences of which are at least as severe as climate change. The work of civil society organization is essential to combat this phenomenon. This year, the BBVA Foundation once again sought to recognize the work of some of these organizations with its Biodiversity Conservation Awards.

Practicing energy efficiency is essential for the protection of the environment. A few simple household tricks will help you manage to reduce your energy consumption while at the same time adding to the household pocketbook.

World economic growth is causing energy consumption levels to skyrocket. According to forecasts, energy needs will expand by 30 percent between today and 2040. This new scenario calls for practices aimed at promoting the efficient use of energy. But, is society really aware of the importance of curbing energy consumption?

BBVA is listed in this year’s edition of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), the market’s benchmark index, which tracks the stock performance of about 3,400 listed companies in terms of environmental, social and corporate governance matters.

BBVA Compass has put its innovative design thinking methodology to work, solving a real-world problem outside its own four walls. Using a common refrain among those who provide response and relief to disasters: all disasters are local. But the increase in the incidence of natural disasters worldwide since the 1970s has made it increasingly difficult for local communities to handle disaster response on their own.

BBVA’s Group Executive Chairman is convinced that, to tackle the enormous environmental, social and technological challenges that climate change poses, the social role of banks needs to completely change. “We need to reimagine the role of banking,” said Francisco González a few days ago, during the BBVA Sustainable Finance Forum event.

The importance of building ties between the public and private sectors to drive the fight against climate change and the opportunities this will spawn for businesses are the main takeaways of the panel on How can institutions foster sustainable development? held during the first edition of the BBVA Sustainable Finance Forum.

Almost nine months after the devastating and historic Hurricane Harvey came through the Texas Gulf Coast, BBVA Compass is reopening the last of its temporarily closed branches with a new design, location and state-of-the-art features.

This Wednesday BBVA will hold the BBVA Sustainable Finance Forum, bringing together investors, businesspeople, institutional representatives, and sustainable finance experts with the aim to boost the finance industry’s role in sustainable development and the fight against climate change. Taking place at BBVA’s headquarters in Madrid, the forum will be inaugurated by the Francisco González, Group Executive Chairman of BBVA, and Spain’s Vice President, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.

BBVA’s Annual General Meeting, which took place on March 16th in Bilbao, boasted an event sustainability management system that was compliant with the UNE-ISO 20121:2013 standard, as certified by AENOR. This certification validates the 2018 Annual General Meeting as a Sustainable Event due to its “clear commitment” to the environmentally, socially and economically sustainable criteria defined by the standard.

The European Commission has published its Action Plan to boost the contribution of the financial industry to the aim of achieving a more sustainable global economy. The Plan is in line with BBVA’s 2025 Commitment, the Bank’s strategy on climate change and sustainability, which involves the mobilization of €100 billion over the next eight years to promote the transition toward a low-carbon economy and the sustainable development.

Fair-trade coffee, quality guarantee, ecological tomatoes… consumers read the labels on the things they eat. But is there any way of checking that what they say is correct? In order to do so, you would need a register of the processes to which the product has been submitted, something blockchain can do.

• Bond issues: Based on the Green Bond Principles, within the Social Bond Principles and the Sustainable Bond Guidelines of the ICMA, the bank will also publish the framework linked to the Sustainable Development Goals required for the issue of its own sustainable bonds
• First Spanish bank to commit to the Science Based Targets Initiative to certify that emission goals are consistent with the decarbonization level required to meet the 2ºC goal set for 2050
• Renewable power pledge: BBVA has pledged to deliver 70 percent of its energy consumption with renewable sources by 2025, and to cut its CO2 emissions by 68 percent
• Fossil fuels: In line with its commitment to transparency, the bank reveals its total exposure to fossil fuels as 3.4 percent of its total assets

BBVA today announced its strategy around climate change and sustainable development, Pledge 2025. The strategy will help the bank meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and is in line with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Pledge 2025 will help the bank align its activity to a 2ºC Scenario and strike a balance between sustainable energy and fossil fuel investments and is based on three lines of action: financing, management and engagement.

Switzerland offers us a multitude of exciting destinations to visit. Unforgettable landscapes, international organizations and cities such as Geneva, Basel or Zurich make knowing the Swiss country a unique experience.

Rosemary and Peter Grant have devoted 40 years of their lives to studying the finches of the Galapagos Archipelago, the birds that inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution. The couple´s work has allowed them to prove that evolution can take place at a much faster pace than previously believed; in less than a decade, the beaks and bodies of these birds can transform to adapt to environmental changes.

Europe’s banks want an active role for the financial sector in the fight against climate change. They are asking Brussels to draw up an urgent plan based on the recommendations of the European Union’s High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance.

A chronic deficit in infrastructure for telecommunications and logistics has hindered  Argentina’s competitiveness in the tourism industry. Even so, since 2015 the country has moved up seven positions in the World Economic Forum’s biannual report on Latin America.

Customer experience, the new business models and investment in social commitment are the three opportunities for the banking industry, as it seeks to maintain a relevant role in society. “Investing in social sustainability is part of the banking industry’s responsibility,” said José Manuel González-Páramo, BBVA’s Executive Director and Head of Economy, Regulation and Institutional Relations, during the event entitled XIII Banking Industry Meeting organized by IESE (13th Meeting of the Banking Sector, organized by IESE) in Madrid.

ShareAction, one of the most important observers of responsible investing, has published a study on the 15 biggest European banks, analyzing how we manage the risks and opportunities related to climate change. This study follows the guide for investors on discussing climate change with their bank that was published a few months ago.

Big Data can play an important role in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which the international community hopes to do by the year 2030. However, to reach this objective, more information and more public-private cooperation is needed.

UN Global Pulse, a United Nations agency that seeks to use big data for the public good, has announced the winners of Data for Climate Action – an open innovation initiative to find solutions for climate change.  BBVA Data & Analytics collaborated with the initiative by providing statistics on credit and debit card transactions in Spain.

The Conference on the United Nations Convention on Climate Change is currently taking place in Bonn, from Nov. 6-17. At a side event hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), BBVA was invited to share its approach to green finance.

This coming Sunday, October 29th, at 3:00 a.m., Spain’s time will change for the second time in 2017. Clocks will be set back an hour to 2:00 a.m., so we’ll get to sleep an extra hour. This will mark the end of Daylight Savings Time, which began on March 31st.

Consumers might see their products at grocery stores across Texas, on airplanes, or at their factory nestled in Houston’s historic East End, an up-and-coming community undergoing a rebirth. Pita Pal Foods, LP is much more than a company producing a suite of Mediterranean products and gourmet foods:  it’s a symbol of how far East End has come.

Agriculture stands at the threshold of a new revolution. The rising population, the competition for increasingly scarce resources and the phenomenon of climate change are just some of the challenges facing the sector as it seeks to feed all of humanity. We need to produce more with less, a challenge that the farm sector has already begun to answer, thanks to the Internet of Things, whose sensors have brought the benefits of big data to the farmsteads and croplands.

BBVA has joined a group of 14 banks that have made a commitment to the United Nations Environment Programme – Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI) to implement the recommendations on financing and climate change published by the Financial Stability Board in July in the framework of the G20.

Known as one of, if not the, oil and gas hub of the United States, the East Texas region suffered another dire consequence of Hurricane Harvey’s ripple effect: the interruptions to the energy companies who had set up shop in the affected areas.

Climate change is one of the greatest problems facing humanity. Abrupt temperature changes, famine, disease and floods are all evidence that changes in the climate are not a myth. The consequences could get worse if we do not manage to reduce the greenhouse effect, as Matthew Liao warns in his book The Next Step: Exponential Life. It can be downloaded at no charge  on BBVA’s website for the OpenMind project.

The possibility of using blockchain technology to monitor the origin of a product or to record intangibles, such as hours worked, opens up a new field that could revolutionize the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility. In this new post on #RevoluciónBlockchain, Iñigo Molero invites you to imagine the uses for a new mechanism to guarantee and give authenticity to companies’ social commitments.

As Houston, surrounding areas and the state of Texas turn their efforts to the rebuilding phase in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, so do small businesses to ensure their operations continue to serve clients and communities.

After barreling into the state of Texas, as one of the largest and most damaging Hurricanes in U.S history, Hurricane Harvey continues to devastate the Corpus Christi-Houston-Galveston area with catastrophic destruction, human losses, and unprecedented flooding.

As the region begins to pick up the pieces in the weeks, months and years to come, there is a growing concern about the impact that Hurricane Harvey will have on the regional and national economy.

Due to the ever-growing demand for green products and services, eco-friendly companies are starting to pursue business opportunities in the Spanish economic landscape. These companies are committed to the generation of sustainable wealth and respect for the environment.

BBVA has signed a 240 million euro sustainable loan in favor of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, the first loan of this kind granted by the bank to an autonomous region in Spain.

Garanti Bank signed an agreement with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) for 5-year term funding in the amount of Euro 75 million equivalent under the Covered Bond Programme. Thanks to this financing, the first transaction settled with EBRD in TL and covered bond format, Garanti aims to boost the expansion of Green Mortgage loans and to protect the future generations with environmentally-friendly buildings.

All eyes are already set on Hamburg, where, under Germany’s presidency, the G20 leaders will be meeting today and tomorrow to agree on a program to deliver on the goal set in this year’s slogan: “Shaping the interconnected world.”

In a report entitled The Future of Football, Futurizon predicts that in the future, sports events will be broadcast using tiny drones capable of hovering a few inches above the playing field, swirling around spectators or chasing the ball in the air. Except for referees, players and coaches, ordinary spectators have always enjoyed these events from architectural points of view:  the stands or the sides of the pitch. And, even if we don’t realize it yet, narratives have also depended on these points of view. What would happen if the perspective changed? Would it be possible to televise a match exactly as the referee sees it? Would that be of any interest at all? Or telling what an embedded drone observes?

Technological capital, human capital, regulatory capital and social capital… all are dimensions that the science of economics measures and includes in its analyses. Cultural capital is not a common concept in this science, however. But Timothy Besley, Professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) feels it is fundamental as a conditioning aspect of the economic activity of any organization, institution or country.

It’s been around for just two or three generations, but plastic has become a pervasive part, not only of our lives but, as researcher Andrés Cózar confirmed in a study sponsored by BBVA Foundation, of our oceans, too. This includes, paradoxically, the one that washes the shores of one of the least populated places on earth: the Arctic Ocean.

There has been an increasing focus on sustainable finance and on the impact of the climate change for the financial stability since 2015 year. Having said that, sustainable finance and the analysis of the consequences of climate change for the financial system are still in a very nascent stage and there is still a lot of work to be done. Two leading projects that are a step in the right direction are those of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) Recommendations -at global level- and the creation of a European Expert Group on sustainable finance -in the EU.

Once again this year BBVA is joining in with Earth Hour as a symbolic gesture on top of its long track record of commitment to sustainability and caring for the environment. This initiative by the World Wide Fund (WWF) is now a decade old, and raises awareness of the fight against climate change by all those who take part in it.

In an environment where companies are becoming increasingly aware about the importance of sustainability, green bonds are taking hold as a funding alternative: In 2016 global green bond issues reached $87 billion, a record level after closing at $42 billion in 2015.

BBVA Data & Analytics, BBVA’s center of excellence in financial data analysis, has announced today that it is joining the “Data for Climate Action” challenge hosted by Global Pulse, a United Nations innovation initiative on big data.

BBVA, the most active Spanish bank as regards the issuance of green bonds in 2015 (according to Bloomberg), has taken a giant leap by signing a green loan in favor of Iberdrola for 500 million euros. Being the first operation of this type for an energy sector company, this agreement involves the highest sum as of this date.

Francisco González, Group Executive Chairman of BBVA, presented the book The Next Step: Exponential Life in an event held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  This work collects the insights of twenty of the world’s most authoritative voices in a number of fields, analyzing the tremendous opportunities – and the risks and uncertainties – that the so-called “exponential technologies” will bring to humanity

How do ecosystems respond to human action? Is it possible to predict their behavior? Ecologists Gene E. Likens and Marten Scheffer, recent BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award winners in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category, have produced work that tackles one of the main challenges this scientific discipline faces.

On Wednesday, BBVA signed a green loan in favor of Iberdrola for 500 million euros. In addition to being the first operation of this type for an energy sector company, this agreement involves the highest sum as of this date.

Gene Likens revealed the environmental impact of acid rain. Marten Scheffer has proven that human activity can bring irreversible damage to nature. Both have contributed decisively to understand how ecosystems respond to human-induced alterations of the natural environment, key to better protect our planet. The BBVA Foundation has recognized the work of these two ecologists with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award.