Endorsed by 312 organizations around the world, this report analyzes fossil fuel financing
from the world’s 60 largest commercial and
investment banks — aggregating their leading
roles in lending and underwriting of debt
and equity issuances — and finds that these
banks poured a total of $3.8 trillion into fossil
fuels from 2016–2020. Fossil fuel financing
dropped 9% last year, parallel to the global
drop in fossil fuel demand and production due
to the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet 2020
levels remained higher than in 2016, the year
immediately following the adoption of the Paris
Agreement. The overall fossil fuel financing
trend of the last five years is still heading
definitively in the wrong direction, reinforcing
the need for banks to establish policies that
lock in the fossil fuel financing declines of
2020, lest they snap back to business-as-usual
in 2021. This year’s report also assesses the current
wave of bank commitments to reduce their
financed emissions to “net zero by 2050,” as
well as related policies like measuring and
disclosing financed emissions. This report was a joint effort between Rainforest Action Network (RAN), BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), Oil Change International
(OCI), Reclaim Finance, and the Sierra Club. Writing and research was led by Alison Kirsch (RAN) with Jason Opeña Disterhoft, Grant Marr, Paddy
McCully, and Ruth Breech (RAN); Maaike Beenes, Henrieke Butijn, Johan Frijns, Ernst-Jan Kuiper, and Daisy Termorshuizen (BankTrack); Dallas
Goldtooth and Alberto Saldamando (IEN); Yann Louvel and Lucie Pinson (Reclaim Finance); Ben Cushing (Sierra Club); and Kyle Gracey and Collin
Rees (OCI). Report design by Toben Dilworth (RAN).
Authors
- Published in
- United States of America
