homehome Home chatchat Notifications


Lenders are 'bankrolling extinction': businesses linked to biodiversity destruction took $2.6 trillion in loans last year

Money matters. A lot.

Fermin Koop
October 28, 2020 @ 6:17 pm

share Share

The world’s largest banks invested more than $2.6 trillion last year in sectors which are the primary drivers of biodiversity destruction, according to a new report. The financial sector is bankrolling the mass extinction crisis, while undermining human rights and indigenous sovereignty, the authors argued.

Credit Flickr Lauria Jacques

The report ranked 50 lenders involved in sectors that pose the greatest threat to wildlife, including Wall Street giants such as Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase. They are providing services to sectors driving biodiversity loss worth more than the GDP of Canada in 2019.

“Imagine a world in which projects can only raise capital when they have demonstrated that they will contribute meaningfully and positively to restoring the planet’s bounty and a safe climate for all. That’s the future this report envisions and builds towards,” Kai Chan, an environmental scientist, told Reuters.

None of the banks assessed have put sufficient systems in place to monitor or measure the impact of their loans on biodiversity loss, nor do they have comprehensive policies to halt it, the findings showed. To revert this, banks should disclose and reduce their impact on nature instead of financing activities such as fossil fuel extraction.

The Bankrolling Extinction report was penned out by portfolio.earth, a new initiative led by finance, economics, and environmental experts to better understand the role of the finance industry in the destruction of the natural world. They aim to amplify the “incredible pressure” mounting upon the finance industry.

In the report, experts matched the sectors identified by the United Nations as the main drivers of biodiversity with the financial services provided by investment banks. They identified $2.6 trillion of loans and underwriting services as being linked to mass extinctions and the collapse of life-sustaining ecosystems.

Some of the sectors include infrastructure, tourism, logistics, transportation, food, forestry, mining, and fossil fuels. They were all identified as drivers of biodiversity loss by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the United Nations’ scientific body on nature.

On average, each of the 50 banks included in the research were linked to finance with biodiversity risk to the tune of $52 billion each. This ranges from more than $210 billion for the largest investor to $1.3 billion for the smallest. The top three of the 10 banks with the largest exposure to biodiversity risks were headquartered in the US.

“Bank by bank, the report authors found a cavalier ignorance of – or indifference to – the implications, with the vast majority unaware of their biodiversity impacts, or associated balance sheet risks,” Robert Watson, former chair of IPBES, told The Guardian. “In short, this report is a frightening statement of the status quo.”

The report called on banks to improve disclosures and reform how they assess possible environmental damage their services might support. Governments need to stop protecting banks’ role in biodiversity destruction and rewrite the rules of finance to hold banks liable for the damage caused by their lending, its authors wrote.

Following the Paris Agreement on climate change, a growing number of investment banks have set restrictions on activities such as coal, Arctic oil and gas exploitation, and tar sands extraction, following pressure by environmental groups.

Bank of America and Citigroup declined to comment on the report, referring to existing sustainability pledges. BNP Paribas said the authors had not contacted it or shared their methodology, so it could not comment. HSBC pointed out that it had teamed up in August with climate change advisory firm Pollination Group.

share Share

Archaeologists Find Neanderthal Stone Tool Technology in China

A surprising cache of stone tools unearthed in China closely resembles Neanderthal tech from Ice Age Europe.

A Software Engineer Created a PDF Bigger Than the Universe and Yes It's Real

Forget country-sized PDFs — someone just made one bigger than the universe.

The World's Tiniest Pacemaker is Smaller Than a Grain of Rice. It's Injected with a Syringe and Works using Light

This new pacemaker is so small doctors could inject it directly into your heart.

Scientists Just Made Cement 17x Tougher — By Looking at Seashells

Cement is a carbon monster — but scientists are taking a cue from seashells to make it tougher, safer, and greener.

Three Secret Russian Satellites Moved Strangely in Orbit and Then Dropped an Unidentified Object

We may be witnessing a glimpse into space warfare.

Researchers Say They’ve Solved One of the Most Annoying Flaws in AI Art

A new method that could finally fix the bizarre distortions in AI-generated images when they're anything but square.

The small town in Germany where both the car and the bicycle were invented

In the quiet German town of Mannheim, two radical inventions—the bicycle and the automobile—took their first wobbly rides and forever changed how the world moves.

Scientists Created a Chymeric Mouse Using Billion-Year-Old Genes That Predate Animals

A mouse was born using prehistoric genes and the results could transform regenerative medicine.

Americans Will Spend 6.5 Billion Hours on Filing Taxes This Year and It’s Costing Them Big

The hidden cost of filing taxes is worse than you think.

Evolution just keeps creating the same deep-ocean mutation

Creatures at the bottom of the ocean evolve the same mutation — and carry the scars of human pollution