August 29, 2023
No Comments
Around 1 million species face extinction in the next few decades and 10% of the earth’s wilderness has been lost in the past two decades.
Humans depend on nature, but unsustainable activities are driving massive biodiversity losses and eroding cultures around the world at a rate higher than ever before in history. Without urgent action to comprehensively safeguard biodiversity and wilderness areas, the prospects of managing other inter-related global challenges, such as climate change and the spread of zoonotic diseases, are grim.
Banks play an essential role in incentivizing, mitigating, or preventing the major drivers of biodiversity loss.
The businesses of infrastructure development, urbanization, energy, agricultural production, and mining industries are closely related if not synonymous with the common drivers of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.
Banks can accelerate or slow down these drivers based on their financing decisions and portfolios.
This is why banks need to be accountable to negative biodiversity impacts, and ensure better and stronger biodiversity safeguards.
Banks should do their part to protect biodiversity and wilderness areas by adopting a No Go areas to prohibit unsustainable, environmentally, and socially harmful activities in and near sensitive areas.
Case Studies
Banks and financial institutions need to be held accountable for their role in driving biodiversity loss, fragmenting critical ecosystems, negatively impacting indigenous and traditional communities, and harming wilderness areas. These campaigns from our case studies exemplify why we need banks to adopt our proposed No Go areas.
