UOB’s loan to coal-miner’s unit spotlights complexities of defining just transition

Commenting on the challenges in defining what economic activities need transition, SMU Associate Professor of Finance Liang Hao, who is also Co-Director of the Singapore Green Finance Centre, noted that this has resulted in the lack of widely accepted taxonomies on transition financing, unlike green and other types of sustainable financing. “Central to the challenge surrounding transition definitions is how to accurately assess transition activities and report the impact of those activities…Due to such lack of principles and guidelines, essentially most loans to carbon-intensive companies can be tweaked as transition financing, said Assoc Prof Liang, who was speaking about the challenges of this particular form of financing and not about the UOB-Adaro’s deal specifically.