Banks provide $4trn to oil since climate deal: NGOs

PARIS: The world’s leading banks have provided the fossil fuel industry with $3.8 trillion in financing in the five years following the signing of the Paris climate accord, a group of non-governmental organisations said Tuesday.

While financing dropped last year as oil output plunged thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the report found that it was still higher than in 2016, the year after the signing of the Paris Agreement where nations agreed to cut back CO2 emissions to limit the rise in global temperatures.

“The overall fossil fuel financing trend of the last five years is still heading definitively in the wrong direction,” said the report by NGOs including Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Oil Change International and Sierra Club.

The report called for “banks to establish policies that lock in the fossil fuel financing declines of 2020, lest they snap back to business-as-usual in 2021.”