The European Central Bank announced that it has fined Paris-based international banking and investment group Crédit Agricole more than €7.5 million (USD$9 million) for failing to meet a deadline set by the central bank to assess the materiality of its climate-related and environmental (C&E) risks.
The announcement marks the second climate-risk related fine imposed by the ECB, following a €187,650 penalty on Spanish bank ABANCA in November 2025 for failing to conduct a materiality assessment of its C&E risks.
The banking penalties form part of a multi-year process by the ECB to ensure that banks properly identify, assess and manage C&E risks, starting with its publication of a guide outlining its supervisory expectations around climate-related and environmental risks in 2020, followed by a climate stress test conducted in 2022, which the ECB said indicated that banks urgently need to accelerate the incorporation of climate risk into their risk management frameworks, and that banks remain heavily exposed to emissions-intensive industries.
In November 2022, following the stress test results, the ECB sent feedback letters to banks, outlining timelines for adequately managing their climate-related and environmental (C&E) risks, and in cases where the deadlines were not met, the central bank imposed binding requirements providing for the accrual of periodic penalty payments as an enforcement measure.
According to the ECB, the periodic penalty imposed on Crédit Agricole follows a deadline set by the central bank for Crédit Agricole to conduct a materiality assessment of its C&E risks by May 31, 2024, with the ECB saying that the bank failed to meet the materiality assessment requirement for 75 days. The ECB said that penalty payment decisions are based on factors including the materiality of the infringement, the duration of the breach and the daily turnover of the supervised entity.
In a statement provided to ESG Today, Crédit Agricole said that it “acknowledges the ECB’s decision,” but that it “can only express its lack of understanding regarding a purely administrative penalty,” noting that the “decision relates solely to Crédit Agricole’s response time to one of ECB’s requirements,” and that “the ECB itself acknowledged that it was very difficult to respond to this specific and highly granular request according to the imposed schedule.” Crédit Agricole also said that “the ECB underlined that Crédit Agricole had met all of its requirements.”
Crédit Agricole added:
“The Group specifies that this decision does not concern, in any way, its commitments and concrete actions in favor of climate and energy transition.”
In July 2025, the ECB said that EU banks have made significant progress in addressing and managing climate and nature-related risks, with major increases in advanced practices in place to identify, monitor these risks made by banks in just the past few years, while still noting some areas of required improvement, including a need by many banks to more completely apply sound practices in their climate and environmental risk management frameworks across all relevant exposures, risk categories and geographical areas.
Earlier this year, the central bank announced a series of new priority areas to advance its work on embedding climate and nature-related risks into its activities, including plans to intensify its work in areas including assessing banks’ green economy transition plans and on analyzing their capabilities to address risks related to the growing physical impacts of climate change.
