Global banks funnel nearly $900 billion into deforestation and biodiversity loss, new report reveals
The world’s largest banks and investors are continuing to finance companies responsible for tropical deforestation, ecosystem destruction, and human rights abuses, according to a major new report released by the Forests & Finance coalition. The findings highlight a stark accountability gap in the global financial sector, even as international governments prepare to review critical biodiversity goals.
Titled Banking on Biodiversity Collapse 2026, the report was published on October 14, 2026, during the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) conference in Amsterdam, just days before governments gather in Armenia for the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP17). Described as the largest global analysis of harmful biodiversity finance to date, it examines financing for companies operating across the world’s tropical forest regions.
For the first time, the coalition’s annual analysis expanded its scope to include metal and mineral mining in tropical forest basins, reflecting the rapid expansion of nickel, lithium, cobalt, and copper production into highly biodiverse regions. The report also broadened its focus to include coffee and cocoa as forest-risk commodities.
The investigation uncovered staggering financial flows enabling these industries:
- Banks have issued US$531 billion in credit to companies operating in high-risk tropical agro-commodity sectors since 2016.
- The report documented US$363 billion in bank financing for metal and mineral mining across tropical forest regions since 2016.
- The average score for bank policies covering financing for forest-risk agro-commodities remains a mere 25%, revealing what the document describes as "major gaps in public commitments towards the protection of human rights and biodiversity."
Significance for India
The report’s findings carry direct implications for India’s financial and corporate sectors. The Forests & Finance coalition’s database explicitly tracks and scores major Indian financial institutions on their environmental safeguards. For instance, the State Bank of India (SBI) has been historically flagged in the coalition’s assessments with very low policy scores (e.g., 0.2) due to a lack of robust, publicly available commitments to prevent financing linked to forest-risk commodities like palm oil.
Call to Action Ahead of COP17
Highlighting the urgency of the issue ahead of the COP17 summit, Merel van der Mark, coordinator of the Forests & Finance Coalition, stated:
“Countries have committed to aligning public and private financial flows with biodiversity goals. With the current voluntary commitments from financial institutions, they are not on track to meet that goal. Financial institutions must strengthen their policies and governments must increase regulation to ensure financial flows are aligned."
The coalition is using the report’s release to pressure both policymakers and financial institutions. The document explicitly calls on governments attending COP17 to strengthen financial regulations that mandate robust biodiversity and human rights due diligence, improve transparency around high-risk sector financing, and hold financial institutions accountable when their capital contributes to environmental destruction or rights abuses.
Furthermore, the coalition urges banks to immediately strengthen "no-deforestation or conversion, no peatland development and no exploitation" (NDPE) requirements, independently verify client compliance, and end financing relationships with companies that repeatedly violate those standards.
As governments prepare to review the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP17, the *Banking on Biodiversity Collapse 2026* report serves as a stark warning: without stringent regulatory oversight and a fundamental shift in financial safeguards, the global banking sector will remain a primary engine of biodiversity loss.
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