Banks arranged $467bn for coal companies from 2022 to 2025, new Urgewald data shows. Where banks adopted coal policies, from the EU to Malaysia, the money has fallen by half or more.
Banks provided $467bn in loans and underwriting to coal companies between 2022 and 2025, according to new research by the German campaign group Urgewald. The yearly total barely moved, from $114bn in 2022 to $118bn in 2025. Its Still Banking on Coal dataset tracks 744 commercial banks.
Those four years began weeks after the COP26 summit in Glasgow, where governments agreed to phase down unabated coal power. In October 2025, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance voted to cease operations after a wave of exits by US, Canadian and European banks.
Most of the money comes from China
Chinese banks supplied $289bn, or 62% of the four-year total. CITIC alone arranged $38bn. Their annual lending rose 8% to $75bn in 2025.
US banks raised coal finance by 23% to $16.7bn last year. Bank of America provided $2.3bn, up 62% on 2022, and JPMorgan Chase $2.2bn. In the UK, Barclays lifted its coal finance by 34% to $1.6bn, while HSBC’s more than doubled to $414m. That growth comes two years after Britain shut its last coal-fired power station.
Coal lending has fallen where banks set limits
EU banks cut their coal finance by 46%, from $4.8bn in 2022 to $2.6bn in 2025. Heffa Schücking, director of Urgewald, credits the banks’ own rules. “Due to the adoption of coal restriction policies by most EU banks, financing for the industry has almost been halved,” she said. Deutsche Bank and Santander, she added, have kept their lending stable.
Malaysia’s four largest banks, CIMB, Maybank, AmBank and RHB, all have coal restrictions. Malaysian banks’ coal financing fell 88% over the period, to $92m. In Thailand, where five banks have no-new-coal policies, lending dropped 74%. Taiwan, with 15 banks under coal limits, saw a 53% fall. Indian banks cut theirs by 19%, although only two of the country’s top 30 lenders have a coal policy.
Clean energy finance has almost drawn level
BloombergNEF counted $1.15tn of low-carbon energy finance arranged by banks in 2025, against $1.19tn for fossil fuels. That puts the ratio at 0.97 to 1, up from 0.89 to 1 in 2024.
European banks arranged $2.50 of clean finance for every fossil dollar, and Chinese banks $1.60. North American banks managed 50 cents. BNEF estimates the global ratio needs to reach 4 to 1 to meet climate goals.
Bank of China lifted its ratio to 1.84 to 1 in 2025, mostly through grid lending. Chinese lenders also supply most of the world’s coal finance. Meanwhile, coal supplied 49.7% of China’s electricity in the first half of 2026, the first time its share has dipped below half.
Cheap solar changes the risk
In Pakistan, solar supplied about a fifth of the country’s power in 2025, up from roughly 3% at the start of the decade. Grid consumption fell almost 12% in the three years to July 2025, and overdue payments to Chinese power plants passed $1.5bn by August.
Sagar Asapur, head of sustainable finance at Climate Risk Horizons, wants Indian banks to adopt coal policies for that reason. “As renewable energy becomes increasingly competitive, investments in coal become more and more risky,” he said.
The test is whether Chinese and US lenders follow the markets they finance. Coal is already losing share in China’s power mix. Urgewald’s next figures will show whether Chinese banks’ $75bn a year falls with it.
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