Lloyds Banking Group has developed a focused approach to both mitigating the effects of climate change and providing the best service possible in the event of a major climatic event. As a member of the Carbon Trust Standard from 2010-14, which independently verifies energy use and emissions, Lloyds has achieved a 2% year on year reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a total reduction of 20% since 2009. This is only a first step, in January Lloyds signed a deal with a new energy supplier in order to ensure that 20% of its total energy use comes from renewable sources, totalling some 114GwH per annum, or enough to power 1,700 Lloyds branches for 10 years. In total, since 2009, Lloyds Group has spent £3.8bn on energy efficiency measures such as installing new lighting, heating and building management upgrades across its property portfolio to further ensure that its environmental impact is as low as possible.
Since the experience of the 2007 floods in the UK, Lloyds' insurance division has led innovative approaches to responding to major climactic events. As a leading party in the development of Flood Re, through the creation of a cross operational team ready to respond to flood crises and the deployment of a flood response vehicle to provide support directly to affected areas, Lloyds demonstrates the best abilities of insurers to support customers through the worst impacts of climate change.
Lloyds is also laying the foundations for future knowledge of our changing climate, for example by funding PhD studies looking questions such as: “How do climate models project that extreme precipitation and extra tropical cyclones will change over NW Europe and the UK?