Regulação e autorregulação bancária em matéria socioambiental

Abstract

The concept of sustainable finance is closely associated with the commitment of financial institutions in preventing and minimizing the environmental impacts associated with their credit portfolios and their businesses. By introducing sustainability into their strategy, financial institutions seek to improve their tools for environmental risk management. For this to happen it is noticeable the increasing regulation for environmental risk assessment as well as national and international initiatives for self-regulation of the matter. The analysis of the regulatory instruments and bank self-regulation in environmental matters applied in financing mineral activity, considering the specificities of this economic sector is the theme chosen for this thesis. The objectives were to identify and analyze the environmental criteria more appropriate for evaluating the environmental funding for mining activity, considering the criteria already adopted in banking in Brazil, the social, environmental and economic peculiarities of mining activity, the instruments of financial regulation and self-regulation and best practices both in national and international environment, and from the identification and analysis of social and environmental criteria, provide subsidies to sectoral policies on environmental assessment in the financing of mining activity, to be adopted by banks in Brazil. To reach these goals an exploratory research collecting primary and secondary data from various sources was employed, the intersection of various data and information were sought in order to observe as many variables as possible to subsidize environmental sector policies for the mining sector. The conclusion points that financial institutions evolved in the adoption of sustainability practices, especially in the analysis of social and environmental risk in project financing, and found that the granting of credit in the form of structured projects or Project finance is the most adequate to ensure the adoption of sustainability standards for the projects, but the lack of specific guidelines in the assessment of relevant impacts and risks of mining was observed in some cases, as the protection of affected communities, adoption of financial guarantees for after closure of mining activity, among others.