In the process of researching our recent briefing paper, “Developing Effective Grievance Mechanisms in the Banking Sector” (published last month by BankTrack and Oxfam Australia), we held a series of discussions with banks about how they understood their responsibilities under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights regarding access to remedy. In these and in the informal conversations we had held with bank representatives before writing the paper, a number of questions and concerns kept coming up. In this blog we review…

The movement demanding divestment from fossil fuel projects that threaten our climate and communities is gaining momentum, but Wells Fargo continues to lag further and further behind. In the United States and around the world, institutions including insurers, churches, universities, and major cities have recently made commitments to divest from fossil fuels. Ireland just became the first country in the world to commit to sell off all its fossil fuel investments. A growing number of major international financial…

Canadian tar sands giant Suncor Energy last week split noisily with HSBC over the bank’s new Energy Policy. Suncor announced to the Financial Post that it will “sever all ties” with the bank in response to HSBC’s move, unveiled in April this year, which puts an end to new financing for tar sands projects and related pipelines. “I have a very long list of bankers”, Suncor CEO Steve Williams has insisted. “The world’s capital is coming to offer itself to Suncor and companies like us so, no, it’s…

By Lucie Pinson, adviser for Friends of the Earth France’s campaign on private finance. Does financing a company active in renewable energy mean supporting the transition to a low carbon economy? Many finance actors would like to answer a simple “yes” to this question, but the reality is not that simple, as many companies demonstrate. The Japanese conglomerate Marubeni is one of them. If the energy transition requires the growth of renewable energy, it also requires a rapid and fair phase-out of fossil fuels. The first without…