Overview
GFANZ, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, was launched at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. Co-chaired by Mark Carney and the Tragedy of the Horizon and Michael Bloomberg, it was conceived as the financial sector’s most ambitious collective response to the climate crisis: a single umbrella body that would coordinate net-zero commitments across banking, asset management, asset ownership, and insurance.
The architecture was intentional. Rather than creating one large alliance, GFANZ brought together existing and new sector-specific alliances under a common roof. The Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative (NZAM), the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance (NZAOA), and the Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) all operated under the GFANZ umbrella. The idea was that by coordinating across the financial chain, GFANZ could create systemic change rather than pockets of voluntary commitment.
At its peak, GFANZ represented over $130 trillion in assets across more than 450 member firms. That number was cited constantly in the months after Glasgow, it was the headline that placed climate finance on the front pages of newspapers that don’t normally cover sustainability. But that number also attracted scrutiny, and the gap between assets nominally committed to net zero and real-world changes in capital allocation became a recurring subject of criticism.
What Members Committed To
Joining a GFANZ sub-alliance required members to commit to achieving net-zero emissions across their portfolios by 2050, set interim targets for 2030, and report progress using TCFD-aligned frameworks. The commitments were to be validated against criteria developed by the Race to Zero campaign, the UN’s broader coalition for non-state net-zero pledges.
In practice, implementation varied enormously. Different sub-alliances set different expectations for what it meant to be “aligned” with net zero. The asset owner alliance (NZAOA), pension funds and insurers who own assets directly, tended to set more specific targets. The banking alliance faced harder questions about how to treat ongoing lending to fossil fuel companies, and the rules around this were contested throughout GFANZ’s existence.
The methodological challenge is significant. A bank that lends to an oil company is not the same as an investor holding oil company equity, the emissions accounting is different, the leverage is different, and the legal obligations are different. GHG Scopes frameworks don’t map cleanly onto financial sector activities, which made GFANZ’s net-zero commitments difficult to verify and compare.
Political Backlash and Restructuring
GFANZ ran into serious political headwinds in the United States. From 2022 onwards, a coalition of Republican state attorneys general and politicians targeted ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing as politically motivated. Major US banks faced pressure, and in some cases threats of legal action, for participating in climate finance coalitions. Several banks withdrew from the Net Zero Banking Alliance, citing concerns about antitrust liability and political exposure.
This created a communications challenge that GFANZ was structurally ill-equipped to handle. A voluntary alliance designed to signal ambition struggles to hold together when membership itself becomes a political liability for some members. The exits attracted more media coverage than the original launches, and each departure was framed as evidence that net-zero finance commitments were fragile.
By 2025, GFANZ had restructured into an independent “Principals Group,” stepping back from the UN-affiliated Race to Zero framework and operating with a lower public profile. Whether this represented a pragmatic adaptation or a significant retreat from ambition depends on who you ask, and that interpretive question sits squarely in the communications brief for anyone working in this space.
GFANZ and the Broader Ecosystem
GFANZ was designed to sit at the top of the Climate Finance architecture, a high-level coordination body that would give credibility and momentum to more granular initiatives. Its members were expected to use tools like the Science Based Targets Initiative to validate their commitments, report via CDP, and engage portfolio companies through Climate Action 100+.
The GFANZ experiment raised fundamental questions about the limits of voluntary private-sector action. Mandatory frameworks, the EU Taxonomy, CSRD, and SFDR in Europe, provide a different model, one where the rules are set by regulators rather than negotiated among willing participants. The tension between voluntary coalitions and mandatory frameworks is one of the defining debates in climate finance, and GFANZ’s trajectory sits at its centre.