BankTrack today releases its Annual Report over 2020, covering our work to stop banks financing harmful business activities and promote a banking sector that respects human rights and contributes to just societies and a healthy planet. 

In a year dominated by the Coronavirus pandemic, in which possibilities for activism on the streets and at bank annual meetings were strictly limited, 2020 was a year of constantly adapting our plans to new realities. It was not the year that any of us predicted, but despite the challenges, it was a year of many highlights.

The report sets out our key activities in our three main strategic areas:

Tracking banks and Dodgy Deals: 

• Our website carried profiles of 215 banks and 257 Dodgy Deal projects and companies, including 74 Dodgy Deals new or updated in 2020 – the core of our work. We continued to advocate for banks not to finance the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) Dodgy Deal in partnership with Ugandan and international groups;
• We actively tracked banking sector initiatives including the Equator Principles and the Principles for Responsible Banking, and multi-stakeholder initiatives including the Soft Commodities Compact and the OECD Project for Responsible Business Conduct in the finance sector;
• On the Equator Principles, we published the first effort at systematically evaluating implementation of the Principles on the ground (“Trust us, We’re Equator Banks”), and a new searchable database of Equator projects;

Campaigning: Our main campaign areas in 2020 were climate and energy; human rights and forests:

• Together with partners, we published the flagship Banking on Climate Change 2020 report (the follow-up to which – “Banking on Climate Chaos 2021” – will be released this week), launched new Policy Assessment Tables on our website, and we began to see the release of new “Paris-aligned” pledges of varying quality from several banks in Europe and the US;
• Investors representing over US$200 billion in assets under management released a statement of support for the BankTrack Human Rights Benchmark, and we began advocating for mandatory human rights due diligence (mHRDD) rules to cover the banking sector;
• We published “Soft Commitments, Hard Lessons”, an analysis of the Soft Commodities Compact, joined  the Forests and Finance coalition and helped launch a new campaign on banks and biodiversity, seeking banks to adopt no go policies for biodiversity hotspots;

Civil society support: 

• We responded to 37 requests for support on bank engagement and campaigning from civil society and community-based organisations via our online Partner Engagement Form and other channels;
• We helped campaigners spread the word about bank-focussed campaign work by publishing 83 news items from partner organisations on our website and in our news digest.

In the report’s foreword, BankTrack director Johan Frijns comments: “We are fully determined for 2021 to be the breakthrough year 2020 wasn’t. There is a lot to do, but apart from all the obstacles, the pandemic has also shown to everybody that, in order to confront a real crisis we have to act decisively and collectively. This holds true for the pandemic as much as for combating the climate crisis and stopping the ongoing devastation of the natural world.”

Download BankTrack’s 2020 Annual Report here.