Levers of climate action: Our own assets

We will continue to maintain a defossilised balance sheet.¹ We also plan to continue to apply our policy restricting cash-out credit to clients operating in fossil fuels. In addition, our balance sheet assets are covered by our science-based targets, where methodology is available. As such, we will regularly review our emission footprint to determine if there are any additional efforts to be made specific to the balance sheet.

¹We exclude pureplay fossil fuel producers and extractors (thermal coal and oil & gas) from our balance sheet. We define pureplay fossil fuel producers and extractors as companies deriving over 25% of their revenues from these activities.

We use balance-sheet capital to seed new products and solutions for our clients. In the course of 2024, we will run an analysis to examine how this seed capital – and our broader balance sheet – can be leveraged to finance new solutions that accelerate the transition.

We will continue to raise awareness of climate change, with a focus on both operations and investment. We are developing a comprehensive responsible investment curriculum to train all Pictet staff, including senior leadership and board members. This will include specific training on climate change and Pictet's Climate Action Plan.

We will also reinforce our internal network of ESG champions, who both relay input from and disseminate knowledge to their representative business lines and corporate functions. They will also provide the first audience to test training and upskilling initiatives.

We will continue to work on providing employees information that will encourage them to take better day-to-day decisions. This includes providing better quality information on their individual footprints to empower change. For example, we plan to launch a mindful travel dashboard (see Managing our direct environmental impacts).

We commit to reducing our scope 1 and 2 emissions by 55% by 2030 (from 2019 levels). To help achieve this, we will continue to decarbonise our electricity through Energy Attribution Certificates and move to fossil fuel-free offices in Geneva by 2025.² We will favour buildings with a lower-carbon energy mix and recognised energy efficiency in any future office moves globally. We are also considering financing biogas supply certificates.

² Our future Campus in Geneva  will be constructed to the highest environmental standards and has been designed to meet top building certifications. 

Our scope 3 emissions come mostly from business travel, where we seek to adopt a mindful approach that we hope will yield emission reductions. We are developing a mindful travel dashboard, to be rolled out in 2023, enabling our employees to better understand their carbon footprints as compared to key benchmarks. It will also suggest ways to reduce emissions. Other complementary measures are being discussed.

Whilst offsets do not (and should not) count towards emission reductions when they are not performed within your supply chain, we believe they help develop the market for carbon sinks. Removal offsets specifically can contribute to absolute emission reductions and reaching the goal of net zero. This is why we will only purchase offsets from removal technologies for scope 1 and 2 emissions and nature-based sequestration projects for 100% of scope 3 emissions.³ Nature-based sequestration will take longer to yield similar emissions absorption and present inherent reversibility risks, but financing it is key to scaling natural sinks, both land-based and water-based.

³ Scope 3 emissions from categories 1 to 14

We will continue to support and strengthen our involvement in our long-standing memberships in material investor coalitions, including the Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change and Climate Action 100+. We will also build new partnerships. One of our current priorities is to ensure links are being created across different collaborative engagement platforms to avoid fragmentation, which often detracts from reaching outcomes. More generally, we will continue to be transparent on our lobbying activities.

We also have regular conversations with non-governmental organisation (NGO) partners. This is why, going forward, our Foundation will continue to be a key catalyst in supporting these initiatives and creating links with them, so that we may learn from them.