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Report Reveals $2 Billion of New Financing by Big Banks for Oil and Gas in the Amazon
"These investments are complicit in genocide: They are killing our culture, our history, and destroying the biodiversity of the Amazon.”
Oct 21, 2025
A day after the Brazilian state-run oil firm Petrobras announced it would begin drilling for oil near the mouth of the Amazon River "immediately" after obtaining a license despite concerns over the impact on wildlife, an analysis on Tuesday revealed that banks have added $2 billion in direct financing for oil and gas in the biodiverse Amazon Rainforest since 2024.
The report from Stand.earth—and Petrobras' license—come weeks before officials in Belém, Brazil prepare to host the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), where advocates are calling for an investment of $1.3 trillion per year for developing countries to mitigate and adapt to the climate emergency.
Examining 843 deals involving 330 banks, Stand.earth found that US banks JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citi are among the worst-performing institutions, pouring between $283 million and $326 million into oil and gas in the Amazon.
The biggest spender on oil and gas in the past year has been Itaú Unibanco, the Brazilian bank, which has sent $378 million in financing to oil and gas firms for extractive activities in the Amazon.
"Oil and gas expansion in the Amazon endangers one of the world’s most vital ecosystems and Indigenous peoples who have protected it for millennia," said Stand.earth. "In addition to fossil fuels leading global greenhouse gas emissions, in the Amazon their extraction also accelerates deforestation, and pollutes rivers and communities."
The group's research found that banks have directly financed more than $15 billion to oil and gas companies in the Amazon region since the Paris Agreement, the legally binding climate accord, was adopted in 2016. Nearly 75% of the investment has come from just 10 firms, including Itaú, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America.
The analysis comes weeks after the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance said it was suspending its operations, following decisions by several large banks to leave the alliance that was established in 2021 to limit banks' environmental footprint, achieve net-zero emissions in the sector by 2050, and set five-year goals for reducing the institutions' financing of emissions.
"Around 1,700 Indigenous people live here, and our survival depends on the forest. We ask that banks such as Itaú, Santander, and Banco do Nordeste stop financing companies that exploit fossil fuels in Indigenous territories."
Devyani Singh, lead researcher for Stand.earth's new bank scorecard on fossil fuel financing, noted that European banks like BNP Paribas and HSBC have "applied more robust policies to protect the sensitive Amazon rainforest than their peers" and have "significantly dropped in financing ranks."
But, said Singh, "no bank has yet brought its financing to zero. Every one of these banks must close the existing loopholes and fully exit Amazon oil and gas without delay.”
More than 80% of the banks' Amazon fossil fuel financing since 2024 has gone to just six oil and gas companies: Petrobras, Canada's Gran Tierra, Brazil's Eneva, oil trader Gunvor, and two Peruvian companies: Hunt Oil Peru and Pluspetrol Camisea.
The companies have been associated with human rights violations and have long been resisted by Indigenous people in the Amazon region, who have suffered from health impacts of projects like the Camisea gas project, a decline in fish and game stocks, and a lack of clean water.
“It’s outrageous that Bank of America, Scotiabank, Credicorp, and Itaú are increasing their financing of oil and gas in the Amazon at a time when the forest itself is under grave threat," said Olivia Bisa, president of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Chapra Nation in Peru. "For decades, Indigenous Peoples have suffered the heaviest impacts of this destruction. We are calling on banks to change course now: by ending support for extractive industries in the Amazon, they can help protect the forest that sustains our lives and the future of the planet.”
Stand.earth's report warned that both the Amazon Rainforest—which provides a habitat for 10% of Earth's biodiversity, including many endangered species—and the people who live there are facing "escalating threats" from oil and gas companies and the firms that finance them, with centuries of exploitation driving the forest "toward an ecological tipping point with irreversible impacts that have global consequences."
Oil and gas exploration is opening roads into intact parts of the Amazon and other forests, while perpetuating the new fossil fuel emissions that scientists and energy experts have warned have no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating.
"With warming temperatures, the delicate ecological balance of the Amazon could be upset, flipping it from being a carbon-absorbing rainforest into a carbon-emitting savannah," reads the group's report.
Jonas Mura, chief of the Gavião Real Indigenous Territory in Brazil, said "the noise, the constant truck traffic, and the explosions" from Eneva's projects "have driven away the animals and affected our hunting."
"Even worse: they are entering without our consent," said Mura. "Our territory feels threatened, and our families are being directly harmed. Around 1,700 Indigenous people live here, and our survival depends on the forest. We ask that banks such as Itaú, Santander, and Banco do Nordeste stop financing companies that exploit fossil fuels in Indigenous territories."
"These companies have no commitment to the environment, to Indigenous and traditional peoples, or to the future of the planet," he added. "These investments are complicit in genocide: They are killing our culture, our history, and destroying the biodiversity of the Amazon.”
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Dispatches From the Winter of Our Discontent Against Woodside Energy's Carbon Bomb
It's been a winter in which our elected representatives still give primacy to commercial interests and the economy over the environment and cultural heritage of Western Australia.
Oct 19, 2025
“This year was a year of change, a year when secret fears come into the open, when discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually to anger. It wasn’t only in me… And it wasn’t only in the nation; the whole world stirred with restlessness and uneasiness as discontent moved to anger and anger tried to find an outlet in action, …” (John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent, 1961)
1 June
Winter 2025 begins with a still, sunny 23°C day in Perth, Western Australia (WA). It’s a reprieve from disgruntlement, discontent, and alarm about the state of the world, especially the genocide in Gaza and long war in Ukraine and, closer to home, the Australian environment minister’s "carbon bomb."
Four days earlier, and only two weeks after being sworn in as Australia’s new Environment Minister, Murray Watt announced his snap decision in favour of Woodside Energy’s bid to keep burning gas until 2070 at its North West Shelf (NWS) plant on the Burrup Peninsula in WA.
I’m still hoarse from chanting “Dis-rupt Bur-rup Hub!” to the rhythmic beat of Drummers for Climate Action at the dusk snap rally outside Parliament House the night before Watt gives conditional approval to Woodside’s "carbon bomb"—a fossil fuel project that will emit more than 1 billion tonnes of carbon pollution.
At home, it’s been a winter in which we witness the wanton destruction wrought upon WA’s native jarrah forests, endangered black cockatoos, fragile coral reefs, and ancient Indigenous rock art by rapacious mining companies.
Never mind the 500,000+ signatories to Greenpeace Australia’s petition to stop Woodside’s Burrup Hub expansion, the hundreds who called Watt’s office, and the thousands who emailed him to voice their objections in the week before his decision. Elections and environment ministers come and go, but none will stop the Woodside Energy juggernaut—Australia and WA’s second worst fossil fuels polluter, headed by American “Methane Meg” O’Neill, formerly of ExxonMobil.
3 June
Federal Cabinet meets in Perth, for the first time since the government was reelected in a landslide and since the March State election returned a Labor Government. Prime Minister (PM) Anthony Albanese responds to journalists’ questions about the NWS extension by emphasising the Government has a target for net-zero emissions (as if approving one of the top 10 fossil fuel polluting projects in the world will help us reach net zero by 2050). The PM sidesteps a question on community anxiety about the environmental impacts by saying he and the people of Karratha “support jobs and economic activities.” The NWS employs 900 people; 280 live locally in Karratha.
4 June
Conservation Council of WA holds another snap rally to protest Watt’s decision, coinciding with Cabinet’s visit. The invitation stipulates BYO “pots and pans and something to hit them with” (the pots and pans, that is, not the Cabinet ministers).
6 June
Three climate activists are fined $10,000 each for trying to take a “stink bomb” into Woodside’s 2023 AGM.
8 June
Premier Roger Cook defends WA’s rising greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, and the NWS extension, with the dubious claim that gas exports from the NWS help other countries decarbonise; spinning Woodside’s line.
20 June
I walk along the grassy banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan-Swan River between the new Boorloo (Perth) Bridge at the causeway and Matagarup (one-leg or knee deep) Bridge at the Optus Stadium, two kilometres upriver. The Whadjuk Noongar people know this place as Joorolup, from the time when there were jarrah forests here.
The Indigenous names for these new bridges co-exist with the naming rights of on-the-nose corporate giants that predominate our public infrastructure in this mining State. The Optus (Yes!) Stadium precinct includes the Chevron Parkland and BHP Boardwalk and Amphitheatre; Chevron and BHP are ranked, respectively, first and fifth of Australia’s "Dirty Dozen" carbon polluting companies.
29 June
For one week of winter, my husband and I go "down south." We’re 400 kilometres away in Walpole walking on the Bibbulmun Track through the tall Karri and Tingle forest—wilderness preserved by the WA Labor government’s decision 25 years ago to cease logging in old-growth forests.
1 July
Flinders Bay, Augusta: There’s a newborn Southern right whale calf with its mother. The marine biologist on the boat says it is unusual to see a calf so early in the whale migration season and a calf born in these cold waters is unlikely to survive to adulthood. It’s a bittersweet reminder of the fragility of our endangered species.
2 July
Driving home from the southwest to Perth on the Wilma Wadandi highway, we cross the Preston River and see the billowing smokestack of Alcoa’s 40 years old Wagerup Alumina Refinery to the east.
WA’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, Alcoa, like Woodside, has a voracious appetite for expansion. It wants to clear another 7,500 hectares of endemic jarrah-marri forest for bauxite mining—3,500 times the size of the 60,000-seat Optus Stadium.
Alcoa’s expansion would destroy up to 144,500 potential nesting trees for endangered black cockatoos—trees that can take up to 150 years to grow suitable hollows for cockatoos’ breeding, according to Birdlife Australia. Cockatoos’ foraging habitat will be lost for up to 11 years, at a time when starving Carnaby’s cockatoos are already being admitted to Perth Zoo for treatment.
The State’s Environmental Protection Authority received a record 59,000 public submissions on Alcoa’s proposal. So, will WA’s new environment minister halt the destruction of our native forests and endangered cockatoos’ habitat and food sources or will he enable their extinction, accelerated by an American-owned aluminium company?
10 July
A Disrupt Burrup Hub activist is fined for blocking access to Woodside’s NWS gas plant; the judge rejects her “climate emergency” defence.
12 July
News from Paris: Last night UNESCO approved Murujuga for World Heritage listing in recognition of its cultural value. Emissions are already damaging the ancient Indigenous rock engravings at Murujuga, adjacent to the NWS, according to eyewitness and measured evidence by local and eminent archaeologists. Minister Watt says he’s put the onus on Woodside to protect the one million Murujuga engravings, but how?
World Heritage listing should force the Government to protect the rock art to a higher standard, but will it?
12 August
World Heritage listed Ningaloo Reef and other reefs along the WA coastline are casualties of the worst marine heatwave ever recorded. It’s sad to see the extensive coral bleaching, caused by heat stress, and a “raging fever” in the case of Ningaloo which experienced temperatures up to 4°C warmer than usual. The Australian Institute of Marine Science attributes the damage to carbon-emissions induced climate change.
Obviously, World Heritage listing does not protect reefs (or rock art) from fossil fuels. That requires governments to stop recklessly approving new coal and gas developments. Will feverish and bleached corals on a possibly terminally-ill Ningaloo Reef give our governments pause for thought about Woodside’s plan to sink 50 gas wells near Scott Reef off the Kimberley coast?
17 August
Requiem for the Reefs held outside the Maritime Museum in Fremantle, which has an Open Day sponsored by Woodside the Reef-Wrecker! About 100 of us, including 3 of the 4 Greens members who now hold the balance of power in the WA Parliament, gather to mourn the bleaching of our once-colourful reefs. Voices for Climate sing; a violinist plays a lament at the edge of a mock reef; we hold up placards and chant, “Save Ningaloo. Save Scott Reef.”
22 August
In a fitting end to our Woodside winter of discontent, another court case goes Woodside’s way. Doctors for the Environment Australia loses its Federal Court case against the approval of Woodside’s Environment Plan for its Scarborough gas project—a floating platform from which to drill 21 wells 375 kilometres off the coast of the Pilbara with a pipeline to bring the gas onshore. Back in 2021, Woodside wanted to dump a 2,500-tonne mooring from a decommissioned floating oil rig next to Ningaloo.
31 August
Winter ends as it began with a deceptively sunny warm 22°C day in Perth.
A winter in which the world’s woes worsened. Israel continues bombing Gaza, and famine sets in. A winter in which Israel bombed Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. A winter in which America bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Iran fired missiles at the US military base in Qatar. A winter in which Russia continues its military invasion of Ukraine and still refuses peace talks. A dark violent winter.
At home, it’s been a winter in which we witness the wanton destruction wrought upon WA’s native jarrah forests, endangered black cockatoos, fragile coral reefs, and ancient Indigenous rock art by rapacious mining companies. A winter in which our elected representatives still give primacy to commercial interests and the economy over the environment and cultural heritage.
12 September
Wildflowers bloom on the banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan, and cygnets bob on its choppy waters on this windy spring day.
Australia’s environment minister confirms approval of Woodside’s NWS extension.
Winter is over, but our discontent lingers and deepens into anger.
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Hundreds of Thousands Mobilize Worldwide to 'Draw the Line' for Climate Action and Justice
"From Indonesia and Turkey, to London and South Africa, activists and campaigners are raising the call to draw the line against injustice, pollution, and violence," said 350.org.
Sep 19, 2025
Ahead of this month's United Nations General Assembly and November's UN Climate Change Conference in Brazil, climate and social justice defenders around the world are taking part in a global week of action culminating in weekend events "to draw the line against injustice, pollution, and violence—and for a future built on peace, clean energy, and fairness."
Hundreds of thousands of people in more than 100 countries are expected to take part in this weekend's demonstrations, which will mark the climax of the "Draw the Line" week of over 600 worldwide actions.
Actions are set to take place in cities including Berlin, Buenos Aires, Dhaka, Istanbul, Jakarta, Johannesburg, London, Manila, Melbourne, Mumbai, Nairobi, New Delhi, New York, Paris, São Paulo, Suva, Tokyo, Wellington, and Belém—where the UN Climate Change Conference, also known as COP30, is scheduled to kick off on November 10.
"United under a call from Indigenous leaders of the Amazon and the Pacific, people across more than 90 countries are joining marches, rallies, strikes, and creative actions to demand an end to fossil fuels, a just transition, and real climate justice," Draw the Line said in a statement.
"The mobilizations highlight escalating climate impacts, rising food and energy costs, deadly floods and heatwaves, and growing insecurity driven by fossil fuels and conflict," the campaign added. "Protesters are also uplifting community-led solutions: renewable energy systems, debt cancellation, fair taxation, and land rights for Indigenous peoples and traditional communities."
From Indonesia and Turkey, to London and South Africa, activists and campaigners are raising the call to ✍️____ Draw the Line against injustice, pollution, and violence, and building the moment for the global weekend of actions starting tomorrow⚡#DrawTheLine
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— 350.org (@350.org) September 18, 2025 at 9:35 AM
According to the climate action group 350.org:
This global moment comes at a critical time when the rich and the powerful countries and corporations continue their colonial and extractivist agenda, while world leaders fail to prevent and stop the genocide taking place in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo, and the governments across the world are veering towards authoritarianism, undoing decades of progress. With every tenth of a degree of global heating, the consequences for people and ecosystems multiply, as seen in the devastating wildfires, typhoons, cloudbursts, floods, and extreme heatwaves already sweeping across continents this year.
“We are drawing the line against deceptive tactics led by rich nations and big corporations to perpetuate fossil fuel dominance and delay the equitable just transition to a fossil-free and healthy planet," explained Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development.
"We demand a complete coal phaseout in Asia by 2035 and a rapid and just energy transition out of fossil fuels and to 100% renewable energy before 2050," Nacpil added. "We demand the full delivery of climate finance obligations of the Global North to the Global South for urgent climate action including just transition. This is a crucial part of their reparations for historical and continuing harms to our people.”
The Draw the Line actions coincide with Disrupt Complicity Weekend of solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights and against Israel's genocide, forced famine, apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonization in Palestine.
Read the full statement: bdsmovement.net/news/disrupt...
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— BDS movement (@bdsmovement.bsky.social) August 28, 2025 at 4:38 AM
“In the current, most depraved, induced starvation phase of the US-Israeli livestreamed genocide against... Palestinians in the Gaza ghetto, Palestinian civil society stands united in calling on people of conscience and grassroots movements for racial, economic, social, climate, and gender justice worldwide to help us build a critical mass of people power to end state, corporate, and institutional complicity with Israel’s regime of settler-colonial apartheid and genocide, particularly through effective BDS actions and pressure," BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti said in a statement this week.
"We are not begging for charity but calling for true solidarity, and that begins with doing no harm to our liberation struggle, at the very least, as a profound moral and legal obligation," he added.
The Draw the Line actions come as the world is on track to overshoot the best-case 1.5°C warming target established under the landmark Paris climate agreement. Experts argue that staying below that limit significantly reduces the likelihood of catastrophic weather events, protects vulnerable ecosystems, lowers the risk of devastating food and water insecurity, and curbs climate-related economic harms.
Not only is the planet on track to exceed the 1.5°C target, a key United Nations climate report published last October warned that the world is on course for between 2.6-3.1°C of "catastrophic" heating over the next century, unless urgent action is taken to dramatically slash greenhouse gas emissions by more than half within the next decade.
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