Three NGOs ask the banking establishment to stop any support for new petroleum and gas projects. BNP Paribas claims to be engaged on this path.
by Stéphane Mandard
A little more than three months after putting BNP Paribas to stop any financial support for new fossil energy projects, associations our business to all, Oxfam and the friends of the land assigned the bank to court , Thursday, February 23. After the condemnation of the State for “climate inaction” as part of “the affair of the century”, after the continuation of totalergies before the courts for its oil megaproject in Uganda and Tanzania, the NGOs now intend to open the first ” trials of a climate chaos financier “.
It will be at the Paris judicial court, according to a calendar which remains to be defined. NGOs already evoke the prospect of a “historic trial”. “This climate litigation against a commercial bank is undoubtedly the first in a long series, all over the world,” thinks Justine Ripoll, of our business to all.
In the assignment, which MO12345lemonde was able to consult, the associations invoke the law on the duty of vigilance to found their action. Adopted in 2017 after the drama of the Rana Plaza (more than a thousand workers in textile multinationals had perished in the collapse of a building in Bangladesh, in 2013), it obliges large French companies to identify the risks and to prevent serious damage to the environment and human rights that can result from their activities. In this case, NGOs criticize BNP Paribas for not applying it in climate matters, continuing to finance companies that develop new petroleum and gas projects.
“Huge responsibility”
“The financial sector has an enormous responsibility in our collective capacity to respect or not the Paris Agreement”, which sets the objective of maintaining warming under 1.5 ° C, estimates Justine Ripoll. Why target BNP Parisbas? Because the French bank is “the first European funder in the expansion of fossil fuels”, justifies Lorette Philippot, specialist in climatic and financial questions to friends of the Earth. Between 2016 (after the conclusion of the Paris Agreement) and 2021, it granted $ 55 billion (51.77 billion euros) in funding, in the form of loans or action emissions or bonds , to the majors of oil and gas like total, BP or Shell. According to data compiled in the 2022 edition of Banking on Climate Chaos, reference report piloted by a dozen NGOs, including Reclaim Finance, these companies are still developing petroleum or gas projects. More than the British HSBC and Barclays (54 billion dollars each) which complete the podium, and much more than the French Société Générale and Crédit Agricole, 16
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