Rome, Thursday November 6th 2025 – A few days before the start of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, ReCommon launches its report “Ten Years Lost” (below, the report in italian).
The research focuses Italian fossil fuel corporation as well as public and private financial institutions’ activities, targeted by the association’s campaigns: ENI, Snam, SACE and Intesa Sanpaolo, all of which are effectively committed to undermine the Paris Agreement. It is worth remembering that at COP21, held in the French capital in 2015, the signatory countries to the agreement, including Italy, promised to «holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels».
Since COP21 in Paris, Italy has had five successive governments and ENI has produced a total of approximately 6.39 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent, declaring each year its intention to increase fossil fuel production at least until 2030. As a result, Italy’s largest multinational corporation could exceed the parameters set by the International Energy Agency’s net zero emissions (NZE) scenarios by 73% (2024) and 89% (2025) in order to achieve the goal of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5°C.
During the same period, Snam and other large transmission system operators spent up to €900,000 on lobbying activities in Brussels, managing to arrange almost 50 meetings with senior European Commission officials to discuss their plans to build or acquire gas pipelines. In just a few years, the San Donato Milanese-based company has become the largest operator of the gas transport network in Europe in terms of controlled infrastructure, which currently corresponds to a network of over 40,000 kilometres of gas pipelines, regasification terminals with an annual capacity of 28 billion cubic metres, and storage facilities with a capacity of 16.9 billion cubic metres.
Investment plans focused on oil and gas that would not be possible without the mediation and support of financial institutions, starting with public ones.
Wholly owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, SACE is Italy’s export credit agency. Its role is to issue guarantees – i.e. public insurance – both to companies whose projects abroad can be insured and to commercial banks, to guarantee loans for companies’ foreign projects. Over the last 10 years, SACE has issued guarantees for the fossil fuel sector amounting to €22.18 billion. It is SACE’s operations that make Italy the leading public financier of the fossil fuel industry in Europe and the fourth largest globally.
Finally, there is Italy’s largest private banking group: Intesa Sanpaolo. According to the latest available data, in 2024 alone, financing for coal, oil and gas by Intesa Sanpaolo increased by 18% compared to the previous year, reaching $11 billion, while investments rose by 16% ($10 billion at the beginning of 2025). ENI remains the fossil fuel corporation most financed by Intesa Sanpaolo; there has also been strong growth in support for Snam (+60% in investments and +96% in financing in 2024).
«When it comes to the climate crisis, there are those who bear greater, incomparable responsibility than individuals: industrial and financial groups, which are a structural part of a system based on fossil fuels. Italy is no exception», Simone Ogno from ReCommon stated. «For too long, this crisis has been portrayed as an abstract phenomenon, thus concealing the fact that we are already paying, literally, for its consequences on a material level. The climate crisis has social, economic and environmental impacts. The time has come for those with the most responsibilities to be at the forefront of paying the costs of this crisis» Ogno added.
