HSBC pledges $100 mln to climate change programs

LONDON (Reuters) - The biggest field experiment to study the effects of climate change on forests will be one of several programs funded by a $100 million donation to climate change charities by HSBC, Europe's biggest bank said on Tuesday.

HSBC said its donation over the next five years will fund research by four charities on the impact of climate change and comes after an influential report last year warned of severe economic and environmental fallout from the impact of global warming.

It is the largest ever donation by a British company, the bank said.

"It's no longer acceptable to deny the reality of this," Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC, said on the impact of climate change at the launch of the HSBC Climate Partnership. "It's a shift in the last couple of years, and the shift in debate is encouraging."

Green said he hoped the move would help build momentum to tackle the impact of global warming.

The four charities receiving funds are The Climate Group, Earthwatch Institute, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and WWF.

Their studies will include the impact of climate change on some of the world's major cities, monitoring the major tropical rainforests and improving management of water supplies from the Yangtze, Amazon, Ganges and Thames rivers.

A report last year by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said failure to tackle climate change could push world temperatures up by 5 degrees Celsius over the next century, causing severe floods and droughts and uproot as many as 200 million people.