nature@banktrack.org
Photo: BankTrackForests play a crucial role to sustain life on earth. Apart from their intrinsic value and beauty, forests perform a wide range of essential ecological functions without which humans and other species could not survive. Tens of millions of people in the world also call forests their home and depend on them for livelihoods.
Despite their value for human beings and the global environment, forests continue to be destroyed at unprecedented rates, and with it the ten thousands of species essential for life to flourish on earth. Only around 30% of the earth's land surface - almost 4 billion hectares - is covered by forests. Of this total forest area, around 271 million hectares are not natural forests but wood plantations and semi-planted forests. The speeds of deforestation may have slowed down during the current decade, yet forests are still being cleared much faster than they can regenerate themselves. In addition to full deforestation, large areas of tropical, temperate, and boreal forests are each year significantly degraded due to over-exploitation.
Everywhere, forests are under threat from a range of factors:
Banks and other financial institutions can play a crucial role in the protection of the worlds' remaining forests, by committing themselves to a zero deforestation goal, ensuring that they will not finance any business activities that lead to further deforestation, especially the further disappearance of old-growth forests. When banks operate in sectors with a potentially strong impact on forests, such as agriculture, mining, and the forestry sector itself, they should develop stringent investment policies that ensure this. BankTrack and Environmental Paper Network developed guidance for such policies for banks and investors active in the pulp and paper sector.
BankTrack's Banks, forests and biodiversity campaign focuses on the financiers of important initiators of deforestation, with the aim to push banks to act more responsibly regarding their forest-related investments. The long-term goal of our work is to help ensure that private sector banks no longer finance companies, projects, and business activities that cause a large negative impact on forests. Within this campaign, we focus primarily, but not exclusively, on biomass, pulp & paper, and other forest-risk commodities, such as soy, palm oil, and timber.
BankTrack is working in partnership with the Forests & Finance coalition to ensure that banks and other investors of these industries have improved access to information about these risks and opportunities and strengthen their policies and practices in financing the sectors. In addition, we research the role of banks that continue to finance projects with large negative impacts, and assist communities affected by such projects in dealing with banks.
