BankTrack today released its Annual Report for 2016, giving an overview of our tracking, campaigning and NGO support activities over the last year, in pursuit of a sustainable and just banking sector.

Significant BankTrack work in 2016 covered in the report includes:

• We launched the Equator Principles Track and Chase project, in a year that saw two projects financed under the Equator Principles, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in the United States and the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras, linked to the violent repression of human rights and environmental defenders.
• We helped coordinate a major push by over 500 organisations and 700,000 individuals to tell the 17 banks behind DAPL to halt further disbursements on the loan until issues are resolved to the full satisfaction of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
• We launched our new website, after a major overhaul aimed at providing a sleeker and easier-to-use platform for our database of bank and Dodgy Deal profiles, reports and news.
• We held our first campaigners’ gathering, creating a platform for campaigners from around the world to share their bank campaigning plans and strategies.
• We published “Still Coughing up for Coal” to coincide with the climate conference in Marrakesh, analysing the coal policies of 22 major commercial banks, showing that these banks’ failing efforts are undermining the aims of the Paris Agreement.
• We benchmarked 45 banks on human rights policies, processes and reporting, in the second “Banking with Principles?” report, and looked in depth at bank responses to human rights abuses in two briefings.
• We made a major international appeal to Ex-Im Bank of India, signed by 140 NGOs in 34 countries, not to finance the Rampal coal power plant in Bangladesh.

Johan Frijns, BankTrack Director, commented: “Building on our efforts in previous years, we achieved many concrete results this year, with the number of European and US banks prepared to finance coal in particular continuing to dwindle. But our campaigning to stop banks financing disastrous deals does not always, of course, yield the desired results. We must reflect on how civil society can win the fight against the financing of iconic projects, like the Dakota Access Pipeline for example, more of the time, and what role BankTrack can play in the global coalition building against such projects. This is our key challenge for 2017."

Download the 2016 Annual Report here.