BankTrack today releases its 2022 Annual Report, detailing the work we did last year towards our new mission – to challenge commercial banks globally to act urgently and decisively on the accelerating climate crisis, the ongoing destruction of nature, the risk of ever more pandemics, and the widespread violation of human rights.

This year’s report is organised around this new mission, which we adopted at the start of 2022, with one chapter for each of these four interrelated global challenges. Some of the highlights and key publications from each campaign include:

Banks and Climate Change

• Working with our partners the world over, we once more published the authoritative Banking on Climate Chaos report mapping bank finance flows to the fossil fuel sector.
• We also published Locked out of a Just Transition, revealing the role of North American and European financiers in fossil fuel finance in Africa; and Banking on Thin Ice, investigating fossil fuel finance by Nordic banks.
• Progress was made as we saw the first banks draw up policies to end their direct financing for new oil and gas extraction projects.
• We launched the Net Zero Banking Alliance Tracker to assess whether NZBA signatories deliver on their promises.
• Our Fossil Banks, No Thanks platform hosted a strategy session at the Climate Justice Camp in Tunisia and joined a series of actions around COP27 in Egypt.

Banks and Nature

• We attended the Biodiversity COP in Montreal, calling on banks to move beyond burning of both fossil fuels and biomass for energy.
• We published “Burning forests in the name of clean energy?”, our first briefing on the wood biomass industry.
• As part of the Drop JBS coalition we raised the alarm on banks’ continued financing of the industrial beef sector.
• We tracked bank finance and policies for forest-risk sectors as part of the Forests & Finance coalition, promoted the Banks and Biodiversity campaign’s “No Go policy” with banks, and repeatedly raised civil society concerns with the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TFND).

Banks and Human Rights

• We published our fourth Global Human Rights Benchmark, showing some slow progress from banks, but a lack of action to address key gaps on reporting and remedy. We also published a second regional benchmark, the Human Rights Benchmark Asia.
• We engaged with the legislative process around European due diligence legislation, helping push back against moves to exclude the finance sector.
• In response to Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine we joined the Business4Ukraine coalition; called on banks to leave Russia; and tracked banks’ exposure and response to the invasion.
• We supported the publication of the Don’t Buy Into Occupation coalition’s second report, examining support by European financiers for companies supporting Israel’s illegal settlements.

Banks and Pandemics

• We published and maintained a new campaign page on our website to thoroughly present the concept of “pandemics risk”, its links to climate change and habitat destruction and what banks can do.
• We integrated pandemic risk in our presentation of the impacts of Dodgy Deals, for example JBS and EACOP.
• In our campaign work focused on the beef industry we systematically pointed out the sector’s impact on pandemic risk.
• We alerted the Equator Principles Association to the need to incorporate ‘pandemic risk management’ into its overall risk management approach.

Dodgy Deal campaigning 

Our work on Dodgy Deals typically cuts across several campaign areas. In 2022 we continued the fight to stop finance for the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), helping secure commitments from most of Total’s main financiers not to bankroll this damaging project. Other fossil fuel projects and companies we targeted included LNG in Mozambique, North Sea oil and gas projects, and Peru’s Petroperú. We targeted financiers of meat companies including JBS and Marfrig; biomass and fossil power companies including Enviva and Drax, and pulp & paper companies including Asia Pulp and Paper and Arauco. We also worked to encourage banks to reject Rio Tinto’s plans to mine lithium in Serbia’s Jadar valley.

New mission, new organisation

To ensure BankTrack is in good shape to deliver on our new mission, we have also realigned our organisation so that it can indeed make a tangible difference on climate, nature, human rights, and pandemics, with campaign leads dedicated to each of these crises, and communication channels aimed at ensuring strong collaboration where these crises intersect, as the often do. We also relaunched our website in February this year with an eye to reflecting these four campaigns better throughout. And we’ve been pleased to be able to grow our organisation, slowly but steadily, to now 12 employed staff, ably supported by eight interns and volunteers. We would like to thank them and the funders who have placed their confidence in our ability to deliver on this mission.

Download BankTrack’s 2022 Annual Report here.