Research On Environmental Responsibility Of Commercial Banks

The economists come to realize the importance of environment for economic and social development as the continued deterioration of environmental condition and put environment into the research areas of economics as a capital. Enterprises are main market players and fulfilling environmental responsibility is not only the objective requirements of social development, but also the inevitable choice of enhancing corporate competitiveness. As an important component of social responsibility, environmental responsibility refers to with the guidance of sustainable development, enterprise implement environmental management to maximize the utilization efficiency and productivity of resources and take responsibilities for environmental problems due to their business and products.Commercial banks are special corporate dealing with money and credit business and play a pivotal role in the modern economy and society. The strengthening environmental regulation and demands from the stakeholders require commercial banks to take positive environmental responsibility which has strong positive externalities. First, banks can set the environmental entry barriers, restrict loans on polluting projects to stop pollution source and encourage the development of environment-friendly projects to optimizing industrial structures and giving full play to the credit leverage. Secondly, banks can spread green ideas to the public and expand public participation in environmental protection by issuing green bonds and funds, having a model effect.However, taking environmental responsibility will increase costs such as monitoring and auditing costs, human resource costs and bring loss of business in the short term. Banks are probably not to take environmental responsibility in the game with stakeholders. However, in the long term, the implementation of environmental responsibility will help banks reduce risks so as to improve risk prevention ability; open up new business areas to get economic benefits; win support of shareholders such as employees, customers and others to improve reputation and gain valuable intangible assets; make innovation on organizational structure, product research and other aspects to enhance market competitiveness, and ultimately the commercial banks can get broad space for future sustainable development. The empirical analysis on Industrial Bank based on exponential curve model and analysis on the panel data by Eviews software confirm that environmental responsibility and economic performance do not conflict.Advice from others may help us overcome our shortcomings. Through the experience of HSBC, Citibank, and Mizuho Corporate Bank of fulfilling environmental responsibilities, the Chinese commercial banks can get such inspiration:put sustainable development into strategic objectives, establish special sector dealing with environmental management and strengthen co-operation with environmental non-governmental organizations.From the cases of Chinese commercial implementing environmental responsibility, we can see that they have got some results, but there are still some obstacles that constraint their development, such as the lack of law, policy incentives, regulatory mechanisms and evaluating standards. This paper presents the corresponding external support countermeasures and conducts an endogenous study to prompt commercial banks to fulfill environmental responsibility in the view of ecological culture.