Barclays Has Claimed Its Earthmark Profile — Leading the Way in Transparent Banking

Barclays has claimed its Earthmark profile, creating a public view of its environmental and governance performance across Financials — including universal banking, corporate lending, retail finance, wealth management, and investment management.

This is more than an ESG badge. It is a structured, benchmarked profile built from two years of public disclosures and contextualised against 1,424 sector peers.

The Numbers Behind the Profile

Barclays’ Earthmark profile includes:

• 119 environmental and governance datapoints, covering direct and indirect emissions, operational energy consumption, governance indicators, and third-party assessments.

• Two years of disclosures, covering the 2024 and 2025 reporting periods.

• 180+ pages of annual and climate reports, processed by Earthmark AI in approximately 8 seconds.

• Performance benchmarking against 1,424 sector peers, showing where Barclays leads, lags, and compares with the Financials sector median.

What’s Behind the Score

Barclays receives an Earthmark score of 2.6 / 5.0, compared with a Financials sector median of 1.2 / 5.0.

The score reflects several areas of measurable operational progress:

• Direct emissions reduction: Scope 1 emissions fell 41.6% year over year, from 8,900 tCO₂e in 2024 to 5,200 tCO₂e in 2025.

• Renewable power procurement: Market-based Scope 2 emissions fell to 2,100 tCO₂e, compared with 74,900 tCO₂e on a location-based basis.

• Low operational intensity: Barclays reports operational carbon intensity of 18.6 tCO₂e per $M of revenue — 80.4% below the Financials sector median.

• Reduced facility energy consumption: Total operational energy consumption fell from 337,388 MWh to 324,185 MWh.

An Area to Watch

Barclays’ profile currently identifies an opportunity to improve disclosure of global corporate facility waste and data-centre IT asset disposition and recycling metrics.

Corporate office waste metrics are not currently disclosed, contributing to an environmental data completeness score of 66%. Publishing these facility-level figures would provide a direct route to 100% completeness, while formalising validated SBTi net-zero target alignment could further strengthen Barclays’ governance profile.

Why Claiming Matters

For financial services organisations, environmental transparency is becoming both a reporting expectation and a commercial requirement.

• Corporate and commercial clients: Enterprise borrowers increasingly assess the sustainability performance of their financial partners as part of their own Scope 3 and supplier reporting.

• Retail customers: Personal banking customers want clearer evidence of how financial institutions are addressing their operational environmental impact.

• Institutional investors and regulators: Stakeholders increasingly need comparable, evidence-based performance data rather than broad sustainability commitments.

By claiming its Earthmark profile, Barclays can take greater control of how its environmental performance is represented, benchmarked, and communicated.

What Claiming Means for Barclays

Claiming enables Barclays to:

• Manage its data: Review and maintain the accuracy of its profile across future reporting cycles.

• Add context: Provide further detail on operational decarbonisation, renewable power procurement, and facility performance.

• Embed its widget: Display simple, comparable signals across relevant digital channels, including sustainability hubs, annual review pages, and corporate lending portals.

• Promote transparency: Benchmark operational progress openly against financial services peers.

The profile is already public and benchmarked. Claiming gives Barclays a way to actively manage and extend that profile.

The Broader Opportunity

Earthmark profiles already reach more than 10 million users across 8,700+ brands. Since launch, directory activity has grown by:

• 176% in users.

• 174% in visits.

• 2x in total sessions.

• 36% in engagement.

Claimed brands receive priority visibility in the directory, ahead of more than 27,000 companies. For Barclays, claiming creates an opportunity to establish ownership of its operational climate narrative as expectations from customers, corporate clients, and investors continue to rise.

Working With Barclays’ Teams

We’re now working with Barclays’ Climate Impact and Sustainability teams to make this benchmarked data more actionable for:

• Commercial banking clients: Supporting supplier data, corporate climate accounting, and sustainability scorecards.

• Retail customers: Providing clearer insight into operational energy and emissions performance.

• Corporate stakeholders: Demonstrating a more transparent approach to environmental disclosure across UK and global banking.

Barclays joins a growing group of proactive brands — including Expedia, DocuSign, Lime, and Virgin Wines — that have claimed their Earthmark profiles and are taking a more active approach to environmental data transparency.

🔗 Take a look at Barclays’ Earthmark page.

Want to see how your organisation compares? Search the Earthmark directory today.