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Environmental Sustainability

Climate Change Risk

We recognize that the world’s climate is changing. Climate change is likely to have profound long-term impacts on our way of life, our communities and more specifically on the way we do business. We recognize that BankUnited operates in and has exposure to areas of the country that may be more exposed to climate change risk over the long-term. While we recognize that the science related to predicting and estimating the long-term impacts of climate change is relatively new and still evolving, we strive to incorporate consideration of climate change risk in our strategic and business decisions.

We continue to monitor the evolution of regulatory developments and industry practice with a view toward developing a more comprehensive framework for assessing, monitoring and managing the impact or potential impact of both physical and transition climate risk on our business. We are currently investing in efforts to help us better dimension the potential impact of climate change on our business and provide more comprehensive disclosures to our stakeholders.

Our Business Continuity Management (“BCM”) department actively monitors severe weather events that may impact the Company's customers, locations or operations including hurricanes, winter storms, flooding, and fire. Given our presence in Florida, during hurricane season BCM continuously monitors and tracks storm activity and forecasted paths. The Company has a comprehensive Hurricane Response Plan that outlines measures to be taken before, during and after a storm strikes, including customer outreach, communication plans, evacuation, and employee safety, safeguarding real estate assets, activation of a command center, the relocation of staff responsible for critical business processes if necessary and post storm impact assessments on both the Company and its customers. This plan has been tested under both simulated and actual conditions. BCM also assesses the resilience of our significant third-party service providers with respect to their ability to respond to service disruptions or degradations resulting from severe weather events. We have migrated our disaster recovery technology infrastructure as well as most of the technology infrastructure supporting daily operations to the cloud to minimize the impact of physical damage to our facilities on our ability to continue uninterrupted operations. Our credit underwriting standards also consider weather event related risks, including risks related to the cost and availability to our borrowers of property and casualty insurance.

Environmental Sustainability Investments and Lending

We view providing financing that promotes sustainable and environmentally friendly practices as prudent and desirable. We have a dedicated sustainability finance practice in our corporate banking division charged with identifying and furthering these opportunities.

 At December 31, 2023, our loan portfolio contained $751 million of loans in the categories of renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transportation, sustainable water, water and waste management, environmental remediation, carbon capture, climate change adaptation, emissions and greenhouse gas reduction, fleet transformation and the financing of energy efficient or LEED certified properties. Our securities portfolio currently contains approximately $321 million in bonds designated by the issuer as green, social or sustainability bonds.