Rabobank at COP 31: turning climate ambition into action

A conversation with Luke Disney, Global Head of Climate at Rabobank

Luke Disney has been Global Head of Climate at Rabobank since 2021, working within the Group Sustainability Office across the bank’s full structure. His work spans carbon accounting, target-setting for high-emitting sectors, and developing climate methodologies for the food and agricultural sector (an area where standard frameworks rarely fit). With COP 31 taking place in Turkey later this month, we asked him what Rabobank hopes to achieve there, and whether there is still reason for optimism.

What are Rabobank’s main priorities going into the COP 31 conference?

I think what matters to us is that we are at a critical juncture, one that is not unique to this COP, but to this decade of climate action. For us, COP is primarily a place to gain strategic insight: to understand emerging approaches and what partnerships are developing. A lot of the real value at any large international meeting comes from the side conversations – the backstories behind what is happening publicly.

Rabobank is an international, cooperative bank with Dutch roots. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do. That’s also why partnerships matter enormously to us, particularly across the food and agricultural chain where we work with public, private, scientific and civil society groups. We are at COP to support and strengthen those partnerships. The policy dimension is also very important; we were pleased to see the recent publication of the EU climate resilience strategy. And of course there is the practical dimension; what is actually happening on the ground, particularly in financial innovation and blended finance solutions. The emphasis, as we see it, is on collaboration and learning.

What concrete outcomes would make COP 31 a success for Rabobank?

We are conscious that we are a small participant in a very large pool. We are not under the pretence that we will shape the outcomes, but we do want to contribute where we can.

On electrification, we would like to see continued support for emissions trading systems. We see these as one of the most efficient policy tools available for driving decarbonisation. We would also like to see more concrete progress on hard-to-abate industries: those large-scale industries that face significant challenges in reducing their emissions on the path to net-zero operations. Grid infrastructure is another area: specifically, we would like to see what steps are being considered for better coordination between EU countries on grid improvements and the development of renewable energy capacity.

Climate adaptation, on the one hand, is very acute; we’re feeling the impacts of climate change more and more intensely as each year goes by. Yet it’s still at a stage where, from our perspective as a bank, we’re still very much trying to understand what sort of reference framework will be used and adopted in terms of adaptation pathways. The EU resilience strategy has set out some interesting thinking and we hope it gains traction.

We obviously would like to see more commercially viable investments, because we want to be able to invest our money in a very structured and scalable fashion. That requires much deeper public-private collaboration in which we have seen a lot of talk, but now it’s time to agree to move on and start setting out the details.

And we are very conscious that this COP takes place in an exceptionally volatile geopolitical environment. Electrification is not only a climate issue; it’s about energy security too. We are interested to see how those two subjects get aligned.

How much weight does the voice of a bank actually carry at an event like COP?

I think people outside the financial sector sometimes imagine that commercial banks have one hand on the money tap and can turn it on and off. The reality is more nuanced.

Banks have importance, but it is important to understand the context. The role of banks in society is to provide a solid, reliable foundation for economies. That foundation, particularly in Europe, does not shift from one day to the next; changes are incremental. However, that means that there is a real temporal dissonance between the urgency that climate change demands and the pace at which banks embed new targets and standards into their processes. Changing the risk models for our credit portfolios, for instance, can take up to ten years, but once those changes are in place, the whole system is on a different course, hopefully towards a more climate-friendly, adaptable and sustainable economy for all of us.

Where do you see the greatest opportunities right now?

Interestingly, I think the opportunity lies partly in the convergence of climate and AI as both being large-scale, rapidly moving global challenges. AI, I think, has actually sharpened people’s attention in a useful way: it is a global phenomenon that needs coordinated response across sectors, geographies, cultures and societies. The structures we need to tackle climate are exactly the structures we need for AI. They are international, multi-stakeholder and collaborative. These two issues are, in a strange way, reinforcing each other. My hope is that this moment of overlapping challenges will reinforce and reinstall a sense of purpose in these international collaborative movements. In fact, organisations like the International Chamber of Commerce are living proof that people intrinsically understand that working together on big issues is the only way to achieve any significant change.

You use the word ‘hope’. Are you optimistic?

I think you have to be able to hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time when it comes to climate. The first is that things are going to get worse; suffering and damage will increase in the coming years, and that is unavoidable. But at the same time, the solutions are already at hand. We do not need science fiction technology to address this. We know how to arrest temperature rises and begin to reverse them. The basis is there.

And we know from the COVID pandemic that if society needs to act quickly, it can. So the hope that many of us maintain is that as things get worse, that will trigger a larger response. We are always capable of more than we think when we work together.

Rabobank is itself a cooperative. Does that shape how you think about public-private collaboration?

It is baked into our DNA, being a bank without shareholders, but with members. At Rabobank, we tend to think of the bank as having three products, not just one. Finance is the obvious one. The second is (sharing) knowledge: we have a very large research department. And the third is network: we sit at the nexus of many different players across value chains, particularly in food and agriculture. We interact with key players from different parts of that chain. And what underpins all of those relationships is trust. That combination of multiple contacts and trusted relationships gives us an opportunity to bring together players around large-scale solutions that go beyond the capacity of any individual actor. That is not unique to us, but it is something we take seriously. Our goal is simple: to help people and businesses realize their future ambitions and provide solutions to challenges they cannot solve alone.