Protecting Biodiversity

Banks and financiers are well positioned to steer financing away from activities which harm biodiversity, people, and the environment. Some of their most harmful financing is going to infrastructure development, fossil fuel energy projects, extractive industries, monoculture agriculture — among others.  

Protecting biodiversity and critical ecosystems is important on its own — but humanity depends on a healthy planet. A healthy planet ensures that we have food that grows and clean water. At the same time, biodiversity is deeply intertwined with climate change, as biodiversity helps sustain ecosystem functions and regulate the climate.  Protecting against habitat loss keeps humans from occupying previously remote areas which increases risks of zoonotic disease. 

Moreover, much of the world’s richest biodiversity is in Indigenous communities. As extractive activities increase, so do risks to local communities and the territories they defend.   

Despite the important role that banks and financiers can play in stopping and reversing biodiversity loss, most do not have effective — let alone robust — policies to do this.  

Friends of the Earth joined civil society and Indigenous stakeholders across the globe in calling upon banks and financial institutions to protect biodiversity and people. We called on financiers to prohibit direct and indirect financing to harmful activities which may negatively impact the eight No Go areas of the Banks & Biodiversity Initiative. These areas include free-flowing rivers, protected or at-risk marine ecosystems, lands with ancestral significance to Indigenous communities, habitats with endemic or threatened species, and intact primary forests — to name a few. This series of briefing papers underscore why banks and financiers should exclude harmful, unsustainable financing for activities and projects that impact critical at-risk ecosystems. 

By working with our partners, we have made progress in holding banks accountable for their biodiversity impacts. We recommended that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) adopt the No Go areas after numerous rounds of consultations over more than a year. And we succeeded.  

Thanks to our activism, both the ADB and the EBRD have now published updated safeguards that will further address biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate change in its investment framework. The ADB recently published its Environmental and Social Framework that makes explicit reference to our No Go areas. 

The ADB’s framework includes new protections for World Heritage sites, free flowing rivers of a certain length, and Key Biodiversity Areas. It also includes expanded requirements for Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) — the right of Indigenous Peoples to consent or refuse any actions that may affect their lands. 

Through its updated Environmental and Social Policy, the EBRD also took on some of our recommendations by explicitly committing to alignment with the Global Biodiversity Framework, and setting out funding exclusions for key extinction sites, World Heritage sites, and free flowing rivers of a certain length. 

This progress shows how banks and financial institutions can be held accountable to protect biodiversity. We will continue to call upon them to fully adopt the No Go areas to prohibit environmentally and socially harmful activities which may negatively impact sensitive areas. To stop and reverse biodiversity loss, it is critical that banks and financiers protect these areas by excluding them from harmful financing.  

We will maintain this momentum to ensure that more banks follow suit and take responsibility to stop and reverse biodiversity loss.