Banks and Biodiversity

On December 12, 2022, seventy-three civil society organizations called on the signatory parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity to take concrete actions to stopRead More »73 Civil society organizations call for bold action from CBD signatory parties

The briefing is part of civil society’s efforts to critique the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and its first draft, exposing how the TNFD could enable widespread greenwashing.

For years, WALHI/Friends of the Earth Indonesia has been a crucial watchdog of the Indonesian government, which has been criticized for facilitating unsustainable projects in the Komodo National Park. Recently, they are raising concerns regarding tourism developments in and around the Park. WALHI’s paper, “Komodo National Park: The Only Home of Komodo Dragons in Peril,” exposes the negative environmental and social impacts of unchecked tourism development on the Komodo ecosystem and the Indigenous peoples who live in the park.

A recent article by Al Jazeera highlights the backwards thinking around the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), which would pose serious threats to several highly biodiverse and critical ecosystems, including at least four of the Banks and Biodiversity No Go Areas. The project’s key developers, Total Energies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, claim to be committed to minimizing the pipeline’s environmental impacts, but turn a blind eye to the fact that EACOP should have been prohibited from the start, by virtue of its location.

The impacts and the needed steps towards solutions of Chile’s pulp and paper industry have been documented in a report released by the Environmental Paper Network together with Colectivo Viento Sur and Global Forest Coalition titled, “Stolen land and fading forests in Chile.” The report is Chapter 3 in a global investigative report series by the Environmental Paper Network titled, “Conflict Plantations.”

This month, Friends of the Earth US submitted feedback to the African Development Bank (AfDB) on how to strengthen the bank’s Integrated Safeguard System (ISS).Read More »Friends of the Earth US’ Observations on the African Development Bank’s Draft Integrated Safeguards System

Yesterday, during Barclays Annual General Meeting, climate activities at BankTrack put pressure on the bank to stop financing the meat, fossil fuel and biomass sectors. Read More »Barclays is big on beef and burning

As the world attempts to address the biodiversity crisis, the concepts of “No Net Loss” and “Net Gain” have become a seductive solution to mitigatingRead More »Global Forest Coalition exposes the social harm done by “net zero” approaches to biodiversity conservation”

While biodiversity offsets may seem like a seductively simple solution to a complex problem, “Fool’s Paradise: How Biodiversity Offsets don’t Stop Biodiversity Loss”, a new briefing from Friends of the Earth US, reveals how an offset approach may actually intensify and cause more biodiversity loss by creating the illusion of biodiversity protection.

Friends of the Earth US has published a new report examining how the international banking sector lacks strong, comprehensive policies to protect World Heritage and other internationally recognized sites. Drawing on six case studies, the report calls on financial institutions to adopt the Banks and Biodiversity No Go policy as a first step towards safeguarding the most special and unique ecosystems on Earth.