End Fossil Finance

We can afford what
we can imagine.

End Fossil Finance

They say there is money to expand fossil fuel infrastructure

They say there is NO money for a just energy transition

They say there is money to double military spending

They say there is NO money for schools and hospitals

They want us to accept that “money is always scarce” (when we need it the most)

They want us to think that “money cannot be created, only borrowed”

They want us to believe that “only the rich and powerful can be trusted with money”

They want us to trust that “money will eventually trickle down” (if we play by the rules)

We dare to imagine otherwise:

We can afford what we can imagine.

Money CAN be made to work for people and not the other way around

Finance CAN serve to defend our common interests against private greed for profit

This will happen only when we join forces across struggles

By standing side by side we challenge the rules of finance

By reclaiming the economy we can reclaim our future

call to action

This is an invitation extended to all frontline communities

impacted by centuries of colonisation

underserved by decades of neoliberalism

vulnerable to climate breakdown

to come together and reclaim control over the financial system

As activists, organisers and campaigners

we believe that our struggles intersect where financial decisions impact us, whether we fight

extractivist projects

energy poverty

real estate speculation

austerity

bullshit jobs

police repression

Would you be interested in connecting and conspiring with like-minded activists from intersecting struggles?

Would you like to coordinate and converge strategic actions targeting central banks and finance ministries?

Then join our broadcast channel.

Discuss with your comrades in which ways this approach resonates with you. Then fill in the form and we will get back to you about the next steps!

Roadmap

In 2024 and beyond, there are many opportunities to come together, to mobilise communities and to challenge financial power. Over the next 6 months we will be collaborating on events and interventions to create spaces for exchange and action to reclaim control of finance. Here are a few potential moments for inspiration. What happens will depend on our collective process.

Swedish banks are masters at greenwashing, while at the same time funding extractivism and environmental destruction of corporations such as SCA. At the same time, the Swedish central bank is not using its seat in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) to regulate banks and end such practices.

5 years of striking and the youth climate justice movement is still standing strong. Neither a pandemic nor the various crises could stop its momentum. On the 19th of April people around the world will again rise to the streets to build counter power and demand #ClimateJusticeNow!

Italy (Torino)

Intesa Sanpaolo AGM

April 24th

The Intesa board will meet for its regular Annual General Meeting where the record breaking 2023 financial statements including a suggested 5 billion euro dividend payment for shareholders will be approved. An excellent opportunity to highlight the obscene profits that fossil companies are making thanks to banks like this one. Beyond Moscow and war, Intesa contributes to the expansion of ENI owned polluting and deadly infrastructure in Mozambique, while scoring as a major funder behind the Trans Atlantic Pipeline (TAP) project. Let’s #EndFossilFinance and #RegulateBanks like Intesa Sanpaolo!

The European Parliament will vote to support new fiscal rules requiring member states to make drastic public spending cuts, impacting funding for hospitals, schools, public transport, energy efficiency measures and more.

Restricting public spending now will have a massive impact on our ability to implement climate solutions, will further drive privatisation of key public services and do nothing to address the cost of living crisis.

Switzerland (Basel & Bern)

UBS and SNB AGM

April 24th & 26th

UBS is one of Switzerland's biggest climate criminals and monster banks. From LNG terminals in coral reefs, to the deforestation of the Amazon - UBS is behind all of it and will meet to approve its 2023 statements including shareholder payouts 27% higher than last year. The Swiss National Bank (SNB) is no better and holds investments in climate criminals such as Chevron, Shell, Repsol or ExxonMobil. That’s why we will pay them both a visit!

Italy (Venaria)

G7 Climate and Energy Ministers

April 28th-30th

Tucked away in the Reggia di Venaria, the G7 Climate and Energy Ministers will sit and talk about what they perceive as “ecology” and “energy transition”. We will organise our presence and raise our voices: these same ministers are co-responsible for many of the environmental and social disasters happening in sacrificed zones of this world! Let us talk about corruption, deaths, environmental hazards and increased violence. Let us resignify what their ecologies and energies are all about.

How does Santander, one of the largest banks in Europe and globally, play a significant role in the exacerbation of the climate crisis by its promotion of oil and gas extraction? By gathering to exchange knowledge on the intersections between the financial system, extractivism, and the climate crisis, Spanish movements aim to raise awareness about the complicity of institutions like Santander in perpetuating these interconnected crises.

Interested in joining this exciting weekend in Madrid in May? Leave your contact and we’ll get in touch.

Italy (Stresa)

G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors

May 23rd-25th

The G7 is a powerful alliance that maintains its power by asserting that destruction and poverty are necessary consequences of its economic project. But we see through their bullshit! Our poverty is their wealth. While normally most focus is on the “heads of state” meeting (see below: G7 Apulia Summit), the main decisions about how much money will be available for what, are made well in advance at this meeting by the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors. Interested in mobilising around these dates? Get in touch here.

Italy (Savelletri)

G7 Apulia Summit

June 13th-15th

The 50th G7 meeting, hosted by right wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will take place in the South of Italy where financial power has intermingled with centuries of agromafia and accumulation of toxic infrastructures. The presidential page praises the beauty of Apulian archaic olive trees embellishing the G7 meeting premises, but last year agreed to the uprooting of thousands of those evergreens in favour of the expansion of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline. This year, the agenda will prioritise war, immigration and relationships with developing nations, in particular Africa where Europe has a growing interest in expanding fossil fuels. Let us join the GSim resistance!

Switzerland (Basel)

BIS AGM

June 29th-30th

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is nothing like your “normal” bank. Also called the Bank of Central Banks, it is the international financial institution when it comes to defining how banking, finance and basically capitalism function. During its Annual General Meeting (AGM) each year the heads of the most powerful central banks come together in Basel, Switzerland to meet behind closed doors to discuss and agree on how and for whom finance is working. Notably, none of them are democratically chosen. The BIS stands for maintaining profit, rather than people and planet.

Struggles

WHILE THE FINANCE THAT MAKES EXTRACTIVISM
POSSIBLE COMES FROM THE GLOBAL NORTH

Most of the extraction and destruction takes place in the so-called "Global South", where peasants and indigenous communities are often dispossessed to make way for new energy infrastructure projects. Here resources are extracted and then mostly exported to the Global North, where resources are consumed and where profit margins are made. Communities on the frontlines of extractivism are left with no choice but to resist, often with dire repercussions including criminalization and murder. At the same time, they are the ones being the most affected by the climate crisis. In Basel, various frontline struggles came together as the Global Coalition of Peoples Facing Extractivism. This page tells their stories of resistance.

Demands

It is time to cut off the financial support for fossil fuels. For the sake of humanity, nature, climate, and financial stability, financial regulators and central bankers must supervise the financial sector's transition away from the destructive and risky fossil fuel industry. This will require decisive action from international standard setters.

We demand to cut financial support for fossil fuels now. This is a responsibility to past, present and future generations. More concretely, we demand the following financial reforms, which represent first, feasible steps in the necessary direction:

1) Application of the "one-for-one" prudential rule for any financing of fossil industry. That is, a regulatory framework that requires banks and insurance companies to back 100% of any financing they provide to fossil fuel companies and projects with their own resources (capital), given the unacceptable risk involved (involving deforestation or ecosystem degradation). Application of a dedicated systemic risk buffer to reflect the systemic dimension of climate change, which will affect companies and financial institutions across economies and geographies

2) Review of the large exposure threshold and credit risk weights for exposures subject to high transition risks beyond the fossil fuel sector

3) Consideration of biodiversity risks in the existing rulebooks for financial institutions.

The FSB should consider climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss from the broader financial stability perspective beyond banking and insurance sectors. The double materiality principle should be at the heart of such considerations: on the one hand, financial institutions face financial risks due to their dependency on climate and nature; on the other hand, they facilitate climate- and nature-destructive activities, which increase the risks for the planet and institutions themselves. The international standard-setters - BCBS and IAIS – should review their rulebooks and implement the necessary steps, as outlined above.

1) The FSB, BCBS and IAIS must be made to confirm an accelerated timeline on the expected outcomes and announce roadmaps for this new agenda.

We demand the critical recognition of indigenous and traditional communities’ fundamental rights, as well as respect for their ways of life, and their systems of knowledge. Amongst others, financial institutions must respect the latter’s right to Free, Prior and Informed consent (FPIC) and binding prior consultation in relation to projects that might affect their territories or ways of living. Particular attention shall also be given to the Right to Say No, which reinforces the central right of communities at large, no matter whether indigenous or not, to reject proposals if the results of negotiations are unsatisfactory. This crucial concept amplifies community voices, and requires companies to value indigenous wisdom and customary law. We thus conceive the Right to Say No as a tool in favour of self-determination and self-governance, enabling communities to shape their own growth model through grassroots methods and local legislation.

We must impose that human and environmental rights prevail over corporate profits. Companies and financial institutions must be nationally and internationally regulated under human rights and environmental law, and be held legally accountable for any violation of health, life, water and people’s autodetermination - fundamental human rights that are systematically threatened by extractive industries. This means that no financial backing should be allowed to support activities that lead to deforestation and the destruction of critical ecosystems such as seas, wetlands, rainforests and the cryosphere. Projects cannot and shall not destroy or break the natural regeneration cycles of ecosystems, thereby destroying their resilience and life-giving capacity.

The Global South "owes" trillions of dollars in debt and, at the same time, owns trillions of dollars in fossil fuels that it is forced to extract to pay. This debt has been contracted by the dictatorship and corruption of the transnationals, imposed by the neocolonial agenda of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G7. It is therefore illegitimate and must be cancelled. Because it prevents countries from developing public policies that benefit their peoples: to cancel the debt of the global South is to guarantee them political and economic space to develop policies for the protection of different ways of life centered on the reproduction of life, communities and ecosystems. Cancelling this debt means creating the possibility of a just and self-determined energy transition, recovering the capacity to invest instead of having the impact of investments coming from elsewhere imposed on them.

We demand all major financial institutions to decolonize global finance. Their function must be fundamentally transformed to address the needs of both the Global South and generations to come. Current debt traps associated with development and disaster relief, unfair credit rating systems, Global North control over the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) voting and reserve asset allocation, structural adjustment and austerity measures, among other policies, all sustain colonial practices. It is essential to promote equitable representation of the nations of the Global South and their central banks in financial decision-making spaces and in global standard-setting.

The Basel Manifesto

THE PEOPLE’S FORUM FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE AND FINANCIAL REGULATION

In June 2023, environmental defenders, climate activists and finance experts came together in Basel to discuss and develop collective plans to bring fossil finance under control, while challenging a major financial institution - the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). One of the outcomes of the meeting was the Basel Manifesto, where the different people across movements from various points of the globe express unified demands that entail the systemic change of our financial system alongside climate justice.

FAQ

Simply put, finance is the management of money. It includes activities such as investing, borrowing, lending, budgeting, saving, and forecasting. Fossil finance is the money that is invested in fossil fuel companies and their projects. This finance comes from several players, for example banks, insurances, asset managers (private) or governments (public). Through finance, extractivist projects like pipelines can be built. Actors invest in these projects, as they hope to make profit. We know that this greed for profit drives the climate crisis, environmental destruction and biodiversity loss. Therefore, by changing the rules of finance, fossil fuel and other extractivist projects would come to an end.

Greed and profit sit at the root of the multiple systemic crises we are facing. What is invested in today impacts what is possible tomorrow. Current finance enables fossil fuels and environmentally destructive businesses while real solutions and alternatives are ignored. By continuing to invest in extractivist projects, they lock us into a vicious cycle of destruction, as investments impose fossil fuel extraction in the long term future.

An example: An investment made today to construct fossil fuel infrastructure to exploit an oil field, will only create money in several years once the construction process is finalised and oil is flowing and sold. Investors of today therefore have an interest in fossil fuels being sold and burned in several years in the future to get their money and profits back. Once an oil field is drilled, the build in pressure created by the infrastructure makes it such that oil flow cannot simply be halted. Therefore, as soon as oil is flowing, it will be always cheaper for fossil fuel companies to try to sell their oil and try to create demand, instead of having to store it. Because of this, it is a crucial priority for the climate justice movement to stop future fossil fuel projects, something that can be achieved by ending fossil finance!

Over the last decades movements and campaigns have focused efforts on confronting or convincing individual banks and companies to stop their financial support of specific projects or sectors. This is important, ongoing work and a useful way to act in solidarity with communities resisting projects on the ground, once permits for projects to go ahead have been granted.

But with over 400 carbon bombs in development, we simply don’t have the capacity to mobilise and resist them all. We need to go on the offensive with a more systemic approach that makes finance of new extractivist projects impossible.

Activists have identified a few regulatory and structural pressure points where intervention and disruption could force changes to the rules that govern fossil finance making new projects impossible. This would be an important first step and open up possibilities for new ideas and structures to emerge that could challenge finance wholesale.

But private financial interests have built strong networks of lobby groups, trade associations and think tanks that use their wealth and power to influence public perception and political discourse.

We see our role to build momentum and capacity to challenge and confront the private networks, while co-creating a new popular mandate that would force power holders to take action.

We recognise that our struggles intersect at the point where decisions are made about money. Because of this, it is crucial we build counter power by collaborating across the intersections of economic and climate justice.

This year, inspired by the Basel moment, a growing coalition of people is building off this work to create a people's mandate and reclaim power of the financial system that is pushing people and the planet to a breaking point.

This is not a single campaign or a day of action. It is an effort to align our analysis, narratives and practices in a way that complementary struggles strengthen each other. We invite you to get in contact with us through this form so we can work together!

In the meantime, we invite you to have a conversation with your group, or some like minded friends or read some of the resources presented below. Here are some questions that you might want to consider:

What intrigues you about this analysis and framework? What don’t you understand and want to find out more about?
Where does financial power manifest itself where you are?
Would you rather organise within your local community or join one of the broader moments outlined in the timeline?

We wish this website to be a resource in the making, allowing organisers to find the resources and the facts they need to add the angle of financial functioning to their struggles. The content here below will expand, as we learn from movements, and as we continue researching the financial sector.

To begin with, several links explaining the functionings of finance, money, debt, banks and profit generation, from Positive Money: https://positivemoney.org/videos/ or from Finance Watch: https://www.finance-watch.org/understand-finance/video/

To dive in further, Banking on Climate Chaos: https://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org/ and Investing in Climate Chaos: https://investinginclimatechaos.org are two platforms collecting data on fossil fuel financing from the world’s biggest banks. Scout this website to find out how much is your private bank allowing the expansion of the most destructive infrastructures, its pipelines, its new wells.

Finally, stay updated here for online capacity workshops on finance:

Join us live, or watch recordings.

In order to get a better strategic and political grip on financial actors and flows, the Global Coalition of Peoples facing Extractivism is launching a new series of workshops on the financial system:

BREAKING DOWN FOSSIL FINANCE

Speakers from FinanceWatch, E3G and the Council on Economic Policies will explain how fossil finance works, focusing on the G20 and central banks and their current agendas on climate security, and there will be time to discuss strategies and actions. Come with your simplest questions and your wildest ideas! The sessions will be held in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish. Please just contact us if you'd like another language to be spoken.

You can ask specific questions in advance here : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VYKbf-NV_FlDQ1gD-aP0LRSi5pxxBZV503j949dTRbY/edit#heading=h.hsvxp9o8e51u

Link to join online: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81077911236?pwd=hzRW7XsJIRL8EV6sCgbl4nCTS5wM53.1 (ID: 810 7791 1236; Password: 811647)

What? Finance Basics & Politics
When? March 29th , 2-4 PM UTC

Who? Benoît Lallemand, Senior Policy Analyst and Secretary General at Finance Watch

Recording of the session available here:

Esp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etxB18LIECE

Eng: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrht4kEk4aA

What? Preparing for the G20
When? April 12th, 1-3 PM UTC

Who? Sima Kammourieh, Programme Lead on international sustainable finance at E3G

Recording of the session will come up soon.

What? Central Banks

When?April 23rd or 25th (TBA) 1-3 PM UTC
Who? Pierre Monnin, Senior Fellow at the Council on Economic Policies

Recording of the session will come up soon.