Perspectives Climate Research again utilized their own methodology to assess and compare Bpifrance the official French Export Credit Agency (ECA), for its alignment with the Paris Agreement.

Overall, Bpifrance was rated with ‘Some progress’ and therefore needs to speed up the progress towards aligning its activities with the Paris Agreement (assessment score 1.07/3.00).

For years, France has played a key role in advancing reforms of the international export finance system, but progress beyond the coal sector is urgently needed. Bpifrance is among the ten European member countries of the Export Finance for Future (E3F) initiative that the Government of France co-launched in 2021, but at the same time exhibits a large volume of support for fossil fuel value chains when compared to other E3F members (EUR 1.62 billion, 2015-2021). This compares to about EUR 1.96 billion for renewable energy and related infrastructure (45% of Bpifrance’s energy portfolio). However, since 2020 almost all energy finance was committed to renewable energies and related infrastructure.

The study explores the main reasons for the score given such as remaining loopholes for Bpifrance to keep supporting oil and gas projects under specific circumstances, particularly oil and gas-fired power plants. The ECA potentially underreports greenhouse gas emissions in other carbon-intensive sectors such as aviation, shipbuilding and military and does not report project-level emissions data in a transparent and granular way. Bpifrance still has to disclose evidence for the effectiveness of its ‘climate bonus’ which offers preferential conditions for sustainable projects in line with the European Taxonomy and close the loophole to support nuclear and gas projects via the climate bonus.