No more bankrolling the Amazon fires

Just like two years ago and last year, the Amazon rainforest is burning — and it's being destroyed by the fire of corporate greed — more profit, more growth, more return on investment. And it's the same banks and insurers that are financing the fires: JP Morgan Chase, BlackRock and others are bankrolling big agribusinesses that burn and bulldoze the forest for soy and beef production.

We can’t let these corporations get away with arson and murder, so let's tell these banks and insurers: Stop setting our planet on fire NOW!

To JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and any bank and insurer with assets in the Amazon rainforest:

Brazil is experiencing unprecedented assaults on Indigenous Peoples’ rights and rollbacks on environmental protections. In the past two years we have witnessed a consistent dismantling of environmental governance and the stepping up of the government’s anti-environmental policy, rolling back enforcement, harassing civil servants, cutting environmental agencies’ budgets, halting the collection of environmental fines, despite rising levels of deforestation.

This has resulted in alarming rates of deforestation with figures in 2020 the highest for 12 years, and growing unchecked in 2021. In June this year, Brazil’s National Space Research Agency recorded the most fires in the Amazon region and in the Cerrado for 14 years, raising concerns about devastating fires to come amidst intense drought and emboldened loggers using ‘slash and burn’ clearing.

As your financial institution is a major investor in/financier of companies operating in Brazil, you must take action to ensure you are not complicit in the deforestation and degradation of the Amazon ecosystem – critical to global carbon sequestration – and the violation of Indigenous Peoples’ rights. We urge you to take a hard line, in public and private, against this regressive legislative agenda put forward by the Bolsonaro administration and its allies in the Brazilian Congress. That includes taking a public stance against all bills that weaken protections for forests and Indigenous Peoples.