Forests & Finance
BankTrack
The Forests & Finance platform is the result of research and investigations by a coalition of campaign and research organisations including BankTrack, Rainforest Action Network, TuK INDONESIA, Profundo, Amazon Watch, Repórter Brasil, Sahabat Alam Malaysia, and Friends of the Earth US. The coalition seeks, collectively, to achieve improved financial sector transparency, policies, and systems that prevent financial institutions from supporting environmental and social abuses that are all too common in the operations of many forest-risk sector clients.
Forests & Finance assesses the publicly available policies of the 200 largest creditors and investors of global forest-risk commodities in Southeast Asia, Central and West Africa, and parts of South America. This is based on the finance received by over 300 companies directly involved in the beef, soy, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber and timber supply chains, whose operations may impact natural tropical forests and the communities that rely on them. The assessment considers the quality of financiers policies on 35 criteria and the coverage over their credit and investment operations and their sector exposure. For a detailed methodology see here.
For a summary of the compiled policy assessments and for the details on the scores per sector and the scoring criteria, check the Forests & Finance website here or the summary briefing here. The below table shows the overall scores of 69 commercial and development banks assessed.
Forest & Finance Policy Assessment 2022: Overall scores
A bank can obtain a total of 10 points for the quality of its policies. The total score is based on their scores per sector, weighted against their financing and investment for each sector. For further details on this see here. Based on their overall score, banks are then classified as Laggards, Followers, Front runners or Leaders, as follows: