MONEY TO BURN: Over 300 banks and investors back 6 of the world’s most harmful agribusinesses to the tune of $44bn
Barclays, HSBC and Santander among names behind companies
implicated in rainforest destruction
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America
and Morgan Stanley also among key financiers.
The burning of the Brazilian Amazon this summer illustrated in the most
graphic way possible humanity’s war on the planet. But such scenes play out every year in rainforests all around the world
to make way for big agribusiness, away from the horrified stare of global
television audiences. These forests are earth’s front-line defence against
climate break-down. One famous study published
in 2017 estimated that forests and other ecosystems could make up more than a
third of the total carbon mitigation by 2030 needed to limit global heating to
a 2° Celsius rise.
Yet between 2001 and 2015, over 300 million hectares of tree cover was
destroyed: nearly the size of India. About a quarter of this loss was driven by
the production of commodities such as beef and palm oil, according to a recent
study. It also found that in south-east Asia alone, deforestation for growing
commodities such as palm oil is responsible for as much as 78% of tree cover
loss. This is madness.
That being the case, it is unsurprising many banks and investors proudly
trumpet policies on ethical dealing, promising not to pump money into companies
that fell and burn precious rainforests. There is only one problem: the same
financial institutions often break their own policies at will, making them
barely worth the paper they are printed on. A Global Witness investigation now
exposes the sheer size and scale of these financial flows – and reveals how a
veritable A to Z of global finance is enabling the destruction of the world’s
biggest rainforests....
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/money-to-burn-how-iconic-banks-and-investors-fund-the-destruction-of-the-worlds-largest-rainforests/
