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We believe that working to promote environmental and social sustainability is a good business practice. We call any of our sustainable effort for Environment as GreenCiti. As a global corporate citizen, Citi shows its commitment to protect the environment through GreenCiti.
As one of the founding members of the Equator Principles, Citi strengthened its efforts to implement the Principles uniformly by revising the company's risk policies and enhancing the Environmental and Social Risk Management training. The Equator Principles are voluntary guidelines based on World Bank and International Finance Corporation policies to evaluate environmental and social risks related to financing development projects.
In March 2008, The U.S. major banks including Citi announced the Carbon Principles, which would be an objective framework to better assess the risks and opportunities around future carbon policy in the United States and the potential impact of these risks on our financial support of new coal-fired plants.
In addition, Citi announced our commitment to target 50 billion US dollars over the next ten years to combat climate change,in the area of investment, office activities, and investing in business facilities. Citi has also set a goal to reduce its global GHG emissions by 10 percent below 2005 levels by 2011.
Citibank Japan's Aoyama Branch received LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification on May 25, 2010, the first time for a commercial retail facility to achieve such certification in Japan.
This followed Citibank Japan's Tokyo Call Center in Shinagawa ward, which received Silver certification on June 12, 2009. The latter is the very first LEED certification in Japan.
LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. The Citibank Call Center was the first LEED certification awarded in Japan.
